Twenty years ago, nearly to the day — on Jan. 22, 2005, at 11:30 p.m. ET — the great Paul Giamatti was midtown hosting Saturday Night Live. The actor was there to do all the "normal" ostensibly fun shit a Saturday Night Live host is there to do: deliver a monologue, crack some jokes, introduce musical guest Ludacris, hang out with Fred Armisen in a catsuit, etc. But Giamatti was also present with an ulterior motive, one that has long been utilized by actors at this exact moment on the calendar in the midst of an SNL season. He was campaigning for an Oscar.
Giamatti was coming off a Golden Globe loss for his nominated work in Alexander Payne's wine country set, divorced guy masterpiece, Sideways, so he came to 30 Rock to take advantage of the incredible platform and showcase Studio 8H presents to the Oscar hopeful: one last chance to make their case for immortality to a captive national audience. Giamatti not only failed in winning, he was outright snubbed for a Best Actor nomination by the Academy when the list came out three days later. But he remains an example of an actor playing the game, using Lorne Michaels' decades-old variety show as another stop on the Oscar trail.
When nominees for this year's Academy Awards were announced this morning (partially by SNL’s Bowen Yang), the freshly 29-year-old actor Timothée Chalamet was nominated as Best Actor for his work portraying Bob Dylan in James Mangold's A Complete Unknown. If the New York City product wins, he will be the youngest actor to ever be awarded the distinction, taking it from his main competition this year, Adrien Brody, who won the award in 2003 (and infamously hosted SNL in May of that year). What makes Chalamet's SNL appointment this weekend notable is he will be pulling double duty, both as host and musical guest.
That itself is not unusual, but the context, the way Chalamet is utilizing SNL, and his stop on the Oscar campaign, is. It's the first time an actor has used the musical performance on SNL to bolster his Oscar chances, and 50 years into the life of this comedy institution, it has a chance to change the way the platform is utilized in these very limited, specific instances. Chalamet will be the 49th artist to perform as both host and musical guest, and it will be the 60th time this has occurred overall, with several artists completing the feat multiple times over SNL’s 50-season run. Charli XCX most recently filled this role back in November. It's a tradition that goes back to Saturday Night Live’s second episode, when Paul Simon did it on October 18th, 1975 (and would do it three more times).
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When a double duty episode occurs, most often it is a case of a musical act with (some) acting chops crossing the aisle to exercise their comedic muscles, as Britney Spears, Megan Thee Stallion, Billie Eilish, Mick Jagger, Quincy Jones, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, Joe Jonas, Stevie Wonder, M.C. Hammer, Garth Brooks, and Chance The Rapper (among others) have. There's also the case of the multi-hyphenate, like Paul Simon......and Art Garfunkel, the artist that blurs the line between musician and actor, who was born for the unique platform SNL provides. Such was the case for actor/artists (or artist/actors) like Donald Glover, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Drake, Ludacris, Queen Latifah, Jack Harlow, Olivia Newton-John, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Kris Kristofferson, and Miley Cyrus (among others).
What is far less common is a talent crossing the aisle in the other direction, an artist we had known almost exclusively as an actor getting on stage to perform music. Again, it's not without some often very strange historical precedents, most often as a novelty/bit. Lily Tomlin did it twice early in the show's history — once with Howard Shore & The All Nurse Band, and once in character as a Black R&B singer?! — as did I Love Lucy’s Desi Arnez, Gary Busey, and (I don't quite know how to define this one) Deion Sanders. It speaks to how playfully elastic SNL can be for a five-tool player, with cast members like Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, Adam Sandler, and Andy Samberg using it to launch winking yet viable music careers.
It is hard to properly communicate what a disaster A Complete Unknown read like on paper. As the title suggests, Bob Dylan is a notoriously enigmatic, complicated figure cinema has covered by basically not covering. The Coen Brothers' 2013 Greenwich Village folk paean Inside Lleweyn Davis didn't, introducing him in silhouette in the film's final moments more as a representative symbol, a kind of apocalyptic reckoning coming for Oscar Isaac's loveable loser, though his presence looms over the entire film. In 2007, Todd Haynes' definitive, masterful I'm Not There created Dylan in the aggregate, using six different actors to more or less impressionistically represent aspects of the artist and eras in Dylan's epic career (aside from Cate Blanchette, who plays Dylan during the A Complete Unknown period, and who still might be the best non-singing depiction of him on screen).
This new project from the director of Walk The Line sounded like the opposite of these unorthodox approaches, a conventional biopic making sense, schmaltz, and dad porn Oscar bait of the most saturated, mythologized moment of Dylan's career: when he broke with Pete Seeger and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, turning Judas on a dogmatic folk scene that saw the use of electricity as selling out on an aesthetic and philosophical level.
Mangold, one of the great chameleon directors of his generation, understood the assignment better than we could've imagined, albeit through a series of disasters and miracles. First, a global pandemic stretched Chalamet's prep time for the film from four months to five years, in which time he learned how to play guitar and cross harp blues harmonica, to sing, and stammer in Dylan's style. Chalamet presents Dylan's aloof, arrogant, affected mid-century Americana in a way that uncannily captures — without parodying — one of the most distinctive, impactful artists who ever lived (and is still alive). It's a feat up there with the great mimetic performances of this century, in league with Will Smith as Muhammad Ali, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles (who lip synched in his Oscar winning turn), Christian Bale as Dick Cheney…. and Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash.
Mangold "solves" an onscreen representation of Dylan by having the good sense to clear out and construct his film around the miraculous work Chalamet put in. His film is less a narrative story than a visual and aural accompaniment to its source material, Elijah Wald's phenomenal, poetic, exhaustive chronicling of the Seeger and Dylan relationship, Dylan Goes Electric!, prerequisite reading for the film. There's little in the way of world-building context, scene setting, or stabs at character interiority (but constant tossed off references to peripheral figures in the story and arcane trivia that lets the superfan know the film did its homework).
A Complete Unknown rocket-launches you through history, opening with Dylan's hitched entry into the city in 1961. We then bounce at light speed from hookups to altercations, from noodling on the guitar in underwear with cigarettes dangling to incredible performances of Dylan's early, formative, timeless songs, pausing only for those tunes. You're hooked from the early moment Chalamet locks eyes with a hospitalized Woody Guthrie (an unsung Scoot McNairy) at his bedside and holds that hum for an endless count in "Song For Woody," delivered by the actor in a perfect recitation of Dylan's distinct nasal, reedy voice — along with incredible, similarly "How the fuck did they do that?" performances from Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. It's a way of explaining Dylan's messianic power via Chalamet's miraculous magic trick. We sit back, mouth agape, watching Chalamet perform Dylan on a highwire, re-experiencing the electricity we were shot through with the first time we saw and/or heard Zimmerman performing Dylan.
This is why — assuming he does the only logical thing with his stage time — Chalamet's double duty performance Saturday night represents a major paradigm shift. He won't just be promoting a movie but explaining why that movie works and why he's in Oscar contention, all in a pair of concentrated bursts lasting about 10 minutes total. The campaign maneuver sets up a future — one increasingly likely with movie slates heavy on artist biopics — in which a mandated piece of the campaign will be the actor in question appearing on 8H stage to perform the music of whichever classic artist they've impersonated onscreen. Along with bringing a cool wrinkle and added emphasis to the SNL Oscar trail stint after 50 years, it could cure the world of awards handed out for hack jobs like the one Rami Malek received for Bohemian Rhapsody, which would perhaps be Chalamet's greatest miracle of them all.
Chalamet's SNL episode airs this Saturday, 1/25 at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC. The Academy Awards will air 3/2 at 7 p.m. ET on ABC.
