Walk Hard Made Timothée Chalamet Doubt His Bob Dylan Biopic

John C. Reilly could make A Complete Unknown but Timothée Chalamet couldn’t make Walk Hard. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection, Searchlight Pictures

Back in 2007, Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow made Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story as a send-up of musician biopics, taking some pretty direct jabs at James Mangold’s then-recent Johnny Cash film, Walk the Line. So call it fate, or maybe justice, that nearly 20 years later, Walk Hard is sowing doubt in the star of Mangold’s upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. “I made the mistake of watching five minutes of that movie before I started this and went, Oh my God, I’ll never be able to do this,” Timothée Chalamet told Zane Lowe on Apple Music. That means he didn’t even get to the Dylan part! No, Chalamet is a serious actor who prefers serious Dylan-inspired films like Inside Llewyn Davis (the real “anti-biopic,” in his estimation).

But anyway, who cares about parodies when you have Dylan himself on your side? Chalamet also told Lowe that Dylan’s manager, Jeff Rosen, went undercover on set one day, and later said Timmy captured “the spirit of Bob.” Chalamet took the compliment until he realized, “Oh no, the real Bob’s such a contrarian that Jeff’s gonna go to him and say this movie looks good, and then Bob’s gonna say, ‘Well it must be a piece of shit.’” Chalamet may have not met the man he’s playing, but he did say Dylan gave notes on Mangold’s script. “He has lines that are his in the script that I relished,” Chalamet said. “There’s one, I was saying to Jim Mangold, the director and writer, and I said, ‘This is good, man.’ I was like, ‘When did you come up with this?’ He was like, ‘Bob put that in.’” But is it as good as anything in Walk Hard?