Timothée Chalamet wishes his Dune: Part 2 co-star Austin Butler could play Elvis in his Bob Dylan movie A Complete Unknown.
In Dune: Part 2, Butler plays Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the bald, black-toothed villainous foil to Chalamet’s luscious-locked future messiah Paul Atreides. And based on how fondly they spoke of each other in a paired interview for British music publication NME, the two actors seem to have really hit it off and become friends.
Chalamet will star as folk-rock music icon Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown directed by James Mangold, and he said he wishes Butler could be there to reprise his role from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.
Timothée Chalamet Wants Austin Butler to Join Bob Dylan Movie
“I wish you were in it,” Chalamet tells Butler in the NME video interview. “I mean, there’s an Elvis character and Johnny Cash, I think. It’s very brief. I was kind of wishing we could create a musical cinematic universe.”
When the interviewer praised both actors for their turns as such iconic figures in music, however, Chalamet said to hold his applause for after A Complete Unknown premieres. As of this writing, it’s still in production, with shoots recreating Woodstock planned in New Jersey from late March through May, New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission director Steven Gorelick told NJ Advance Media for NJ.com.
“I’ve been picking Austin’s brain non-stop,” Chalamet told NME. “But I feel — let’s let my film come out before I’m so lucky as to get included with Austin, ’cause he did such a phenomenal job I’d be lucky to do. But I do feel prideful about that too, because those are two artists that — I can’t speak from Elvis’s perspective — but deep in the bob Dylan lore, he had tremendous respect for Elvis and Sun Records.”
Butler wishes he could be there while A Complete Unknown is filming, too.
“Timothée works so hard and it’s so cool to discuss process and talk through things. I can’t wait for that film. I wish I could be on set every day to just watch the magic happen,” Butler said.
Watch their full interview below.
A Complete Unknown was originally supposed to start filming last year, but was delayed due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, according to NJ.com.
The film’s title is a reference to lyrics in Dylan’s song Like a Rolling Stone: “How does it feel/ to be on your own/ with no direction home/ a complete unknown / like a rolling stone. “
Just don’t call it a Bob Dylan biopic. Mangold told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that the film is “not really a Bob Dylan biopic,” but is instead about a “specific moment” in New York City’s folk scene during the 1960s and how it was thrown into upheaval by Dylan’s sound.
Also Read: Behind Austin Butler’s Terrifying Dune 2 Transformation Into Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen
Bob Dylan himself, aged 82, is very hands-on with the project.
“I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me. He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love Cop Land,'” Mangold said. (Cop Land is Mangold’s 1997 crime-thriller starring Sylvester Stallone, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, and Harvey Keitel).
Mangold got to spend multiple “wonderfully charming” days with Dylan discussing the movie.
“It all has tremendous relevance even now because of the way we are all so tribalized with rules about what our music should be, about what our rules are, how we speak, how we express ourselves,” Mangold said. “And Bob from the beginning has always been someone who is always pressing against those boundaries.”
Other cast members of A Complete Unknown include Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange, Sherlock), Elle Fanning (Super 8, The Great), Boyd Holbrook (Narcos, The Bikeriders), Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick, FUBAR), and Nick Offerman (Parks and Rec, The Last of Us).
Main Image: Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in Dune: Part One and Austin Butler as Elvis in Elvis. Photo credits: Warner Bros.
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