What Timothée Chalamet Will Do on SNL Is a Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet is hitting the Oscars trail hard right now in support of his role as Bob Dylan in the film A Complete Unknown. An eventual stop along the way at Saturday Night Live is thus to be expected. Well, like clockwork, on January 10, NBC announced that the Club Chalamet muse will be hosting the sketch show on January 25. But that’s not all he’ll be doing. In an unexpected turn, Chalamet will also be pulling double duty as the episode’s musical guest. Given that Chalamet has no current career as a recording artist to speak of — his infamous teenage rap history notwithstanding — the only reasonable conclusion is that the actor will be performing as the musical guest in character as Dylan, or at least to perform Dylan music. Asked for comment about what Chalamet will be doing as musical guest, a source close to SNL told Vulture, “I guess we won’t know until he performs.”

If Chalamet performs in character as musical guest, it would be nearly unprecedented in SNL history. In 1999, Garth Brooks hosted the show and his alter ego, Chris Gaines, was the musical guest, and Donald Glover/Childish Gambino pulled a similar double role in 2018. But at least both Gaines and Gambino were established musical artists. Fifty years in, SNL is showing it can still break new ground. If the show is just letting characters do musical performances anyway, fingers crossed SNL’s resident Dylan impersonator, James Austin Johnson, gets a turn.

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