Re: Relentless comments

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Interesting read, from Rolling Stone:
Timothée Chalamet Was ‘Relentless’ in Trying to Stay Immersed as Bob
Dylan, Says Edward Norton: ‘No Visitors, No Friends, No Reps. Nobody
Comes Around Us While We’re Doing This’
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Elle Fanning told Rolling Stone as part of its new Timothée Chalamet
cover story that she was warned before filming “A Complete Unknown” that
Chalamet would mostly “keep to himself” on set while playing Bob Dylan.
In order to become the music icon, Chalamet tried his hardest to stay
immersed in Dylan’s shoes, so much so that the call sheet referred to
Chalamet as “Bob Dylan” and not as his real name. Fanning got tricked in
pre-production when she was invited to meet with director James Mangold
and “Bob.”
“I was thinking about all these things to say and ask,” Fanning said
about the prospect of meeting with the real Dylan. “I was picking out my
outfit. ‘I’m meeting Bob Dylan today!’”
Then Fanning went to set and discovered that “Bob Dylan” as listed was
actually Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan. She wisecracked: “I’m probably
the first person in life to be let down by having a rehearsal with
Timothée Chalamet, right? Like, the first girl in history.”
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Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown” and told Rolling
Stone that she first met Chalamet when he was already Bob Dylan.
“It wasn’t so full-on,” Barbaro said of Chalamet’s Method acting. “It
wasn’t ‘Don’t look him in the eye’ or anything like that. We said hi,
gave each other a hug. I was like, ‘I just saw Dune!’ [But Chalamet did
stay] in his own world [on set] in a way that I think Bob often was as
well. And it was actually really conducive to the dynamic between Bob
and Joan.”
Barbaro remembered there was one day when the she was chatting with
Chalamet about everyday things in between takes, only for Mangold to
note that Chalamet’s Dylan voice was starting to slip. “And at that
point I think we both were just like, ‘Nope, no more talking!’” she
recalled.
Edward Norton stars in the film as Pete Seeger and says Chalamet was
“relentless” in making sure he could stay immersed as Dylan, adding: “No
visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while
we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something
that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people. And I agreed totally —
it was like, we cannot have a fucking audience for this. We’ve got to
believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that
protective.”
Chalamet did not get into full detail about his Method acting during the
Rolling Stone interview, but he did admit that staying immersed as the
character was in part a desire to return to his acting roots and to a
time “when people aren’t curious about how you go about your work,
because they don’t know who you are yet. Which is how the experience was
for me on ‘Call Me by Your Name.’”
“It was something I would go to sleep panicked about: losing a moment of
discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds —
because I was on my phone or because of any distraction,” Chalamet
added. “I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five
years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my
eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a
step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my
life!”