Timothée Chalamet dug deep when he pulled double-duty as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live last January during his promotional run for the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. How deep? According to the Marty Supreme star he dug way down into his own pocket to pay for the musical portion of the two-fer. “I spent over six figures out of my pocket to do the SNL performance,” Chalamet told an audience at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on Sunday (Feb. 1) during a conversation with Love Actually writer/director Richard Curtis.
Chalamet explained why he works so hard to find novel ways to promote his movies, explaining that even SNL boss Lorne Michaels wasn’t feeling his offer to perform the Dylan songs on the episode the actor was hosting. “Lorne Michaels said, ‘Hey, do you want to host SNL?’” Chalamet told Curtis. “I said, ‘Yeah, can I do the music?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ I said, ‘All right, I’m not doing it.’ He said, ‘Okay, do the music.’ But I refused to take no for an answer.”
Chalamet eventually got his way, but instead of performing some of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s most beloved hits, he played a high-energy version of 1965 Bringing It All Back Home deep cut “Outlaw Blues,” a spoken word take of the New Morning tone poem “Three Angels” and the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II song “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.”
A spokesperson for SNL did not respond to Billboard‘s request for comment on Chalamet’s out-of-pocket claims, but Entertainment Weekly reported that its digging revealed that Chalamet covered production expenses for his performances, including paying the band and construction of a set, costs typically taken on by a recording artist’s record label.
Chalamet further described to Curtis his bespoke approach to promoting his films, which has ranged from showing up to look-alike contests, to recording a lip synch video to Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” on a New York city pier, turning the Las Vegas Sphere into a giant ping-pong ball for a Marty Supreme stunt in which he became the first person to stand on top of the giant dome and an instant classic unhinged Zoom appearance to promote the ping-pong movie.
But for Chalamet, these aren’t just eyeball-grabbing stunts, but another form of expression for the actor, who at age 30 has already racked up three best actor nominations for his roles in Supreme, A Complete Unknown and his breakthrough role in 2017’s Call Me By Your Name.
“This risks killing any mystery around it, but I really don’t look at it as promotion or marketing. I see myself as an artist expanding,” Chalamet said. “And certainly the Zoom had a little bit of satire to it, but the initial video in the glass box, those [ping-pong ball] heads, I feel like I’m expressing myself. You know, a lot of people want to be told what to say, how to say it and where to stand — I’m talking on the acting front. Also, people don’t want to misstep. I feel like I’ve got the keys, I’ve got the right attitude, I’ve got the juice.”
Chalamet called his out-of-the-box efforts a “new way of doing stuff. I’m trying to reach audiences, you know. I don’t want to be in the pretentious in-crowd,” he explained. “Marty Supreme in America had the least frequent moviegoing audience this year — people that weren’t going to see everything. That’s my favorite feedback on the movie. So the most pretentious answer I could give you, which I actually honestly feel, is that it’s not marketing or promotion. That sounds like a gimmick, and this is not a gimmick. This is coming from my heart and my soul.”
noreferrer”>
