We Bought a Zoo Turned Elle Fanning Into a Bob Dylan Stan

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Gilbert Flores/Variety, Michael Kovac/WireImage/Getty Images

While most of her peers were going wild for Justin Bieber or One Direction, Elle Fanning was a 13-year-old Bob Dylan stan. “I wrote ‘Bob Dylan’ on my hand every day in middle school,” Fanning told Rolling Stone for a cover story on Timothée Chalamet and the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. And where’d Fanning get her retro tastes? Nowhere else than the set of We Bought a Zoo, where rock-nerd director Cameron Crowe introduced her to Dylan’s music. Now, 13 years later, Fanning feels like she “manifested” her role as Dylan’s activist romantic interest Sylvie Russo in the film. (The character was renamed from the real-life Sylvie Rotolo, a move Fanning thinks was done at Dylan’s request, since Rotolo was “a very private person” and “very special and sacred to Bob.”)

But Fanning still hasn’t parlayed her A Complete Unknown role into a chance to meet the man himself. She got her hopes up when she received a pre-production itinerary that listed a meeting with director James Mangold and “Bob Dylan.” “I was thinking about all these things to say and ask,” Fanning said. “I was picking out my outfit. ‘I’m meeting Bob Dylan today!’” But when she got to the meeting, it was just her, Mangold, and Chalamet — who’d been listed as Dylan because he’s playing the man. “I’m probably the first person in life to be let down by having a rehearsal with Timothée Chalamet, right?” Fanning said. “Like, the first girl in history.” But she wasn’t as disappointed once she heard Timmy-as-Dylan sing, which brought her to tears. “All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that,” Fanning said. “So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”