Elle Fanning had “chills” watching Timothée Chalamet perform in character as Bob Dylan for the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown.

The Great actress couldn’t stop herself from welling up when she watched Chalamet perform “a whole concert” as the iconic musician, marking the first time she had witnessed him singing live on set.

“We were in an auditorium, and I was sitting amongst all these background artists. Jim (Director James Mangold) would let Timmy come out and give the crowd a whole concert. He was singing Masters of War and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, and I was like, ‘Jesus,'” she recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“All of us were kind of shaking, because it was so surreal hearing someone do that. So perfectly done, but it wasn’t a caricature. It was still Timmy, but it’s Bob, and this kind of beautiful meld. That gave me chills.”

A Complete Unknown follows Dylan as he arrives in New York in the 1960s and ultimately shakes up the folk music scene by going electric. Fanning plays his love interest Sylvie Russo, a fictionalised version of the musician’s girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who died in 2011.

The actress told the publication that Dylan didn’t want Rotolo’s real name to be used in the film, explaining that the late artist was “a very private person (who) didn’t ask for this life” and “obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob”.

However, Mangold wouldn’t definitely confirm Fanning’s assertion.

A Complete Unknown will be released in the U.S. on Christmas Day and the U.K. on 17 January.

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