See Timothée Chalamet Sing as Bob Dylan 4 Years Ago While on the Set of Dune

Timothée Chalamet is revealing a new persona: Paul Atreides Dylan. 

The 28-year-old star appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday, Dec. 12 to share a throwback glimpse of him preparing to play 1960s-era Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown — while on the set of his Denis Villeneuve-directed fantasy epic Dune: Part One. 

“That’s me on the set of Dune,” he explained as Colbert, 60, showed first a photo then a video clip of Chalamet playing a guitar while in the costumes of his Dune character Paul Atreides. “That’s Paul Atreides Dylan, right there.”

Chalamet booked James Mangold’s biopic about Dylan, 83, before the COVID-19 pandemic and Hollywood strikes delayed the project. “I started to think, ‘Man, is there a hex on his project, on this material?’” he told Colbert. 

Filming A Complete Unknown in the summer of 2023 “was a relief,” he continued. “I felt like I was getting something off my plate I’ve been working on for so long.”

“You did two Dune movies in the interim,” pointed out Colbert. “In between, yeah,” said Chalamet. 

The video clip showed the actor channeling Dylan by strumming along to “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” the legendary singer-songwriter’s 1965 hit — “with some Dune lyrical variations by me,” quipped Chalamet.

The Oscar nominee also revealed that part of the reason he ended up singing live on the set of A Complete Unknown was due to a costar. “I had Edward Norton as the devil on my shoulder, and he said, ‘Listen man, you sound better live,’” he recalled.

“The pre-records we had done in Los Angeles,” Chalamet added, didn’t feel as true to Dylan’s aesthetic. “The worst thing we could have done with a Bob Dylan biopic is sanitize it, make it sound clean. This was a man from iron ore country… You hear the coal country in his voice. I didn’t want to be a New Yorker recording in Los Angeles, decimating that music. I wanted to honor that legacy.”

Co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks and adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 biography Dylan Goes Electric!, A Complete Unknown costars Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie and more. The movie is in theaters Dec. 25. 

Among Chalamet’s other upcoming projects is Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, costarring Gwyneth Paltrow.