I know you want to keep some things private, but was there anything that she told you maybe that is public knowledge that you hadn’t really fixated on that you sort of left that conversation saying, oh, I need to think about this as I sort of move forward?
Well, a couple of things. I mean, one little moment of connectivity that I really loved was when I was asking about these brilliant arrangements she had of particular songs, like tuning a step down for “House of the Rising Sun,” and where did she get that? And just almost as a point of intrigue more than anything. And she was talking about training and how she would fall asleep. She would be playing her guitar for so long she’d fall asleep with it and then wake up in the morning and grab it and keep playing. And I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve done that.” I just thought that was cool. Again, I just felt really connected with her. And then, at one point, I think I was trying to sort of express to her in some way without saying too much that it was a movie about Bob Dylan ultimately. And that I am sort of doing everything I can to advocate for who I’ve learned that she is. And at one point, she was like, “I’m just in my backyard listening to the birds.” And for me, that was just a sign of “I have my own life.” She was not hell-bent on trying to prove something with this movie. She definitely wasn’t trying to control any of my impressions of her, and she’s not really tied up in what we say about her. She is Joan, and she is a legend. And I have so much respect for her, but knowing that kind of allowed me to, I think, sort of walk through this door and come out on the other side as, yes, maybe a version of her, but just sort of embrace what I knew to be her essence and then have fun with it.
At one point in a New Yorker article, as she was releasing a book of illustrations, she said that you can’t try to make the drawing too perfect because the moment you do that, you rob it of what makes it interesting and creative, human, all of that. I just tried to remember that as I went along that, you’re not going to get her. It’s not going to be perfect. You’re not going to be Joan, but you can take your understanding of her and trust that and then breathe life into it. The last thing I wanted to do was rob her of her colorful, spirited personality.
One of the things I love about the film and your performance is she was, in many ways, she was a female pop star who was ahead of her time. I think so many younger people will see this film and not realize how big she was then. What about her career surprised you the most in the research you did?
It’s interesting. I feel like it’s the duck paddling on water because I think to people, she seemed really confident and calm and graceful and almost spiritually on another level angelic. But then she talks about having a lot of stage fright, and I think I kind of related to that in a way. I think sometimes I feel like a mess, and then I watch something back, and I’m like, “Oh, there seemed to be some kind of ease from here up.” And so I found that to be really interesting, and I sort of just played with that dynamic a bit, and I think maybe some takes appeared more confident, and some takes probably revealed some of that stage fright and some of maybe what I was trying to process as her in the moment. But then, of course, you just trust your brilliant director, James Mangold, to take whatever you’re doing and run with it and put together whatever version of Joan that he wants her to be because, at the end of the day, this is his version of this story.
Granted, it’s in front of extras or recruited audiences, but you have all these big audiences where you’re singing live, and you’ve already mentioned that’s not your forte. Did you have stage fright?
Oh god, yeah. Huge amounts of stage fright, and I just tried to make sure they weren’t completely debilitating. And the way of doing that for me was just to keep practicing and obsessing, really, and then trying to let go. The conversation I had with Joan was actually the night before I performed for a live audience for the first time. And yes, they are extras, and yes, they’ve been told to either be fans or be contentious with us. The Pittsburgh scene with Timmy was really fun because they were booing and yelling at us, and we had incredible background artists in this movie, but they’re also New York background artists, and that means a lot of them are also musical theater majors and singers. And people would come and be like, “Oh, I’m a singer,” and you’re like, “Sorry.” At one point, I think I looked out on the day I did “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” I was like, “Does anyone play guitar? Are you tracking when I mess up a chord?” And a few people were like, “You’re doing great.” They were really supportive, probably because they were supposed to be, but yeah, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to do any of that in front of people. And I lucked out when I got to perform next to Timmy because whether our characters are contentious or not in any given scene, I just felt very supported by the work that he had done and the sound of our voices together as Bob and Joan and his playing. He had just been so thorough with his process, and I just felt very supported by him, and it was a lot of fun to get to perform with him.
From your perspective, why do you think Joan was so fascinated and enamored with this young Bob Dylan that she met?
In a way, he has this magnificent charisma that was just very natural to him. But I think at the time, she was like you had said, she was at the height of her career. She was world-renowned on the cover of Time, but I think she was hoping to say more with music. I think she understood that she had this big platform and a lot of attention, and I think she grappled with her relationship with fame. She was singing beautiful songs with deep messaging, but I think she wanted to say more, and I think she wanted to say more about what was going on at the time and in a fresh way. And I think Bob was putting words to things that she was trying to say. He had the poetry to explain, I think, a lot of what she was feeling. And so I think she was just really drawn to him in that way. She was drawn to his, what people have sort of called protest music, and everything he was saying about society. I think we all are.
“A Complete Unknown” is now playing nationwide
