Timothée Chalamet is opening up about his experience playing Bob Dylan in the upcoming movie A Complete Unknown.
In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Chalamet calls playing Dylan “the most unique challenge I’ve taken on,” but notes he gained his confidence by performing all the movie’s music live.
“Maybe it was the least responsible thing on the actor’s part because the music exists and the performances exist,” he said. And while Chalamet did prerecord songs, in the end he opted to sing live during filming because he felt the recorded tunes were “too clean,” noting, “There’s not a single prerecord in the movie.”
While fans may be hoping to learn a lot more about Dylan watching the film, Chalamet warns that they aren’t really seeing a true biopic on the legendary singer.
“This is not definitive, this is interpretive, this is not fact, this is not how it happened,” he says. “This is a fable.”
As for how he approached playing Dylan, Chalamet explains why he didn’t want to directly mimic the singer.
“Somebody once said to me, ‘You can’t make a movie about a painter because it’s not interesting to watch paint dry,’” he said. “Bob has that element because he’s not one of these forward-facing musicians.”
And while he did have a vocal and dialect coach, Chalamet says he found that it wasn’t “my style” or Dylan’s either.
“Bob did not have a vocal coach. He had two bottles of red wine and four packs of cigarettes,” he said. “There’s no way to impersonate that.”
Matthew McConaughey says it took turning down a $14.5 million payday for Hollywood to take him seriously in dramatic roles.
The actor appeared on tennis pro Nick Kyrgios‘ Good Trouble podcast and revealed he left Hollywood for Texas because he kept getting scripts for romantic comedies.
After a string of successful ones, like How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days and The Wedding Planner, he wanted more.
“When I was rolling with the rom-coms, and I was the ‘rom-com dude,’ that was my lane and I liked that lane. That lane paid well … I was so strong in that lane that anything outside that lane – dramas and stuff that I want[ed] to do … Hollywood said, ‘No, no, no. You should stay there.'”
He added, “So, since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I … moved down to the ranch in Texas.”
He reportedly told his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey, “I’m not going back to work unless I get offered roles I want to do.”
The actor and author says he stuck to his guns even after studios sweetened the deal with a potential paycheck as high as $14.5 million. “That was probably seen as the most rebellious move in Hollywood by me because it really sent the signal, ‘He ain’t f****** bluffing,'” McConaughey recalled, noting the gambit worked.
He insists, “The devil’s in the infinite yeses, not the no’s. ‘No’ becomes more important than ‘yes.'”
McConaughey says N-O is even more important if you’ve become successful. “We can all look around and see we’ve over-leveraged our life with yeses and going, ‘I’m making C-minuses and all this s*** in my life because I said yes to too many things.'”
Keke Palmer has been grinding since she was 11, but not without some ups and downs. The star of December’s SELF cover, Keke opened up about some of her struggles, which at one point included handling fame.
“I wouldn’t understand it at the time, but I think when I was younger, I did hold a lot of grudges and it was truly suffocating for me,” she said. “I felt so isolated in my experience and I blamed everyone around me … I never really told anybody. I was just writing it in my journal.”
Over time, Keke learned how to deal with the feeling of isolation by understanding she’s not alone. “How I deal with it is to not center myself,” she says. “I think about all the other people who feel weird in the world, because if we take all the glamour out of it, and all the specifics and uniqueness of what it means to be famous, it just means feeling weird.”
“I think everybody in the world feels extraordinarily alienated,” she continues, “and we feel even more alienated when we alienate others. And that’s what comes with fame.”
Though she knows her journey from humble beginnings was far from easy, Keke clarifies that her struggle made room for her success story.
“Everybody always felt so bad for me, like I was so much better than where I came from—when the reality is, I am who I am because of where I came from. I love my parents. We are doing this together,” she says. “So it’s also a lot of reclaiming the fact that my life may be different, but please don’t pity me and don’t make me feel like I’m some kind of sob story, because I’m proud of who I am.”
Meanwhile, the release of Keke’s buddy comedy with SZA, One of Them Days, has been moved up from Jan. 24 to Jan. 17.
