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In the upcoming film A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan. The actor spent years preparing for the role and sings live in the film. During one scene, Chalamet sings the entirety of one of Dylan’s early songs. He admitted that he felt so moved by the scene that he went home and cried.

Timothée Chalamet went home and cried after singing a Bob Dylan song

In an early scene of A Complete Unknown, Chalamet performs the entirety of “Song ti Woody” to Scoot McNairy, who plays Woody Guthrie. Guthrie was Dylan’s hero, and he sought him out when he moved to New York. Chalamet sings live in the scene.

“His performance,” co-star Edward Norton told Rolling Stone, “is off-the-charts great.”

Chalamet said he felt very moved in the aftermath of the shoot.

“I went home and I wept that night,” Chalamet said. “Not only because ‘Song to Woody’ is this song I’ve been living with forever, and I felt like we brought it to life, but also because I felt like I could take myself out of the equation. The pride I was feeling had no vainglory in it. I just felt, ‘Wow, this is like old-school theater or something.’”

It made him feel proud of the film he was a part of making.

“We’re, like, bringing life to something that happened, and humbly and bravely going on this journey to hopefully bring it to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t know about it,” he said. “That felt like an honorable task.”

The artist spoke about what it was like to meet Woody Guthrie 

Dylan discovered Guthrie before he moved to New York City. He admitted that his love of the artist was part of the reason he left Minnesota for the East Coast.

“Like seeing Woody Guthrie was one of the main reasons I came East,” Dylan told The New Yorker in 1964. “He was an idol to me. A couple of years ago, after I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to.”

Dylan said that the meeting didn’t go as planned, though.

“But I couldn’t confess to him,” Dylan explained. “It was silly. I did go and talk with him — as much as he could talk — and the talking helped. But basically he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realized that. So Woody was my last idol.”

Elle Fanning said Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan voice is impressive

Chalamet said that he knew he had to sing live. The performance wouldn’t have felt right without it.

“You can’t re-create it in the studio,” he said. “If I was singing to a prerecorded guitar, then all of a sudden I could hear the lack of an arm movement in my voice.”

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Elle Fanning Admitted She Was ‘Let Down’ She Had to Rehearse With Timothée Chalamet in ‘A Complete Unknown’ 

Elle Fanning, who plays Dylan’s girlfriend Sylvie Russo in the film, said Chalamet’s voice moved her to tears.

“We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists,” she said. “[Director James Mangold] would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing ‘Masters of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that.”

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