Timothée Chalamet hosted Saturday Night Live last night (January 25) and played a trio of Bob Dylan songs on the show – see footage below.
Fresh off picking up an Oscar nomination this week for his portrayal of the songwriting legend in A Complete Unknown, the actor treated viewers on NBC to three deep cuts from the Dylan archives.
From behind dark sunglasses, he fronted a full-band version of ‘Outlaw Blues’ from 1965’s classic ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, which then transitioned into ‘Three Angels’ from 1970’s ‘New Morning’, for which Chalamet took a seat at the front of the stage for the spoken word vocals.
Chalamet, who performed dozens of Dylan tracks himself in the biopic, was not in full Dylan voice mode on SNL, but he did return later in the show for an acoustic version of ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’, a track first included on 1971’s ‘Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II’.
A Complete Unknown charts Dylan’s controversial switch from acoustic to electric guitar in the mid-’60s. Dylan served as an executive producer on the film, which is an adaptation of Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties.
The film bagged eight Oscar nominations in total, including Best Director for James Mangold, Best Supporting Actor for Edward Norton, and Best Supporting Actress for Monica Barbaro, as well as Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound and Best Costume Design.
NME gave the film a four-star review, with Alex Flood writing: “The most important (and often trickiest) job of any music movie is to get the music right. And this nails that. If you’re a Bob newbie, you’ll leave the cinema ready to dive into his back catalogue. If you’re already a fan, the next few weeks will be spent making playlists of lesser-known B-sides or reading the lore around a scene you weren’t familiar with. And that’s why it was a good idea to make this film – a mad idea, but a good one.”
Chalamet drew some attention to himself recently when he rode a Lime bike into the London premiere of the musical biopic, and was then fined for doing so.
The actor last hosted SNL in 2023, when he impersonated legendary director Martin Scorsese and was joined by boygenius in a sketch where all four were dressed up as Troye Sivan, parodying his ‘Got Me Started’ dance.
