Timothée Chalamet’s transformation into Bob Dylan for music biopic A Complete Unknown has earned him widespread acclaim – including the most coveted of them all, an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Much has been made of his Dylan-esque guitar playing, showcased both in the movie and during his double-duty appearance as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. And while the film features an array of high-end Gibsons, Chalamet started on a humble $200 Yamaha from Guitar Center – just like the rest of us.
“When he first came over we used my guitar. I told him, ‘Show up without a guitar. I have a couple of guitars for us,’” Larry Saltzman, Chalamet’s guitar tutor, tells MusicRadar.
“Then he went to Guitar Center here in New York, on (West) 14th Street. And again, this was pre-Covid, November or December of 2019. He did the most humble thing, he went in there and he bought a $200 Yamaha acoustic guitar.
“I spoke to Jim Mangold, the director, about that. Jim was asking, ‘Does he have a guitar?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he went and bought a $200 Yamaha guitar. And Jim goes, ‘That’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Look, if he shows up with it and I think it’s not appropriate we’ll go shopping and I’ll return it.’”
However, the budget-friendly Yamaha turned out to be the perfect guitar to start Chalamet’s deep dive into all things Dylan.
“It was very playable and sounded good. And the other thing that was good about it was that you don’t really have to worry about an instrument like that and if it falls over it’s not the end of the world – rather than going out and getting the proper vintage J-45.
“I loved that he showed up with a $200 guitar. He didn’t show up with a $2,000 guitar and he could have. I just loved that he did that. It’s humble.”
For the movie itself, Gibson kitted the actor out with plenty of acoustics, including a pair of custom J-50s as stand-ins for The Bard’s original 1947 model, the smaller-bodied, quasi-parlor-style Nick Lucas Special, an SJ-200, as well as a few J-45 round-shouldered dreadnoughts.
Each of the guitars were fully set up with aged strings for historical accuracy and to capture the rawness of Dylan’s early recordings. “A lot of the time it was about how we get the guitar to sound almost worse,” admitted Executive Music Producer Nick Baxter.
In more A Complete Unknown news, Saltzman recently shared what it was like to teach Chalamet the nuances of Dylan’s playing – and the trickiest song the actor had to learn.
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