“I thought he was fantastic. I really loved the whole film”: Cate Blanchett heaps praise on Timothee Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob Dylan, having previously played him herself

Cate Blanchett has heaped praise on Timothee Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, describing it as “fantastic”.

Blanchett, of course, has been in Chalamet’s shoes before. She was one of a number of actors who portrayed Bob in Todd Haynes’ unconventional 2007 biopic of the man, I’m Not There.

In a new interview with NME, Blanchett said of Chalamet: “I thought he was fantastic. I really loved the whole film.”

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“A Complete Unknown is a very different endeavour to Todd Haynes’ film, which was about shape-shifting identity and an artist’s refusal to be pinned down,” she said. "I’ve never been more liberated than [when I was] asked to play so wildly against type and gender… Because you knew there was a woman [behind] that iconic silhouette of Dylan when he went electric, you were complicit with the audience in it. There was no way you’d ever be accused of mimicry.”

When asked if she’d change anything about her portrayal of Dylan in the film, she said: “As time goes by you [realise] cinema is temporal so [if you went back], you’d probably do it entirely differently. But with that film, the character was made up of everyone’s portrayal. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, they all put in remarkable, astonishing performances. I was but a part of it.”

I’m Not There took an unorthodox approach to get to the heart of Dylan’s personality. The six actors played characters, some fictional, some based on real people that represented a different side of Dylan. So Ben Whishaw played the 19th Century poet Arthur Rimbaud, Richard Gere was the outlaw Billy The Kid and Blanchett took on the role as ‘Jude Quinn’, a folk singer who is accused of ‘selling out’, before turning to drugs and dying in a motorbike crash (a nod to Dylan’s own 1966 accident after which he temporarily withdrew from music).

Elsewhere in the interview Blanchett, reveals that she’s a fan of Icelandic group Sigur Ros and that became “addicted” to hearing Sonic Youth live after she saw them in Toronto many years ago. “I think when people make beds of sound like that, it goes into you in a visceral way that you can’t get in a [studio] recording.”