Timothée Chalamet’s ‘A Complete Unknown’ Harmonica Coach Had Never Seen a Timothée Chalamet Movie

When professional harmonica player Rob Paparozzi was tapped to help Timothée Chalamet play Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he wasn’t exactly familiar with the 28-year-old sensation.

“Never heard of him,” 72-year-old Paparozzi told GQ. “I had mentioned it to my son and he said, ‘You don’t know who he is?! That’s the guy from Dune.’ And then my grandkids, they’re eight and 10, they’re going, ‘No, that’s Willy Wonka.’ And I’m going, ‘Who?’”

Chalamet had already spent five years working with another harmonica coach (plus a vocal coach and a guitar coach) to portray the Dylan of the 1960s in James Mangold’s biopic, out on December 25th. The New Jersey-based Paparozzi came in to get the actor comfortable going full Dylan on the harmonica onscreen. Here, he tells GQ everything about the experience.

GQ: Before we get into the movie prep, tell me about yourself. How did you start playing harmonica, and when did you realize you would be a pro?

Rob Paparozzi: I got into the harmonica in 1966. My older brother, who just left us about a couple of months ago, was a big Bob Dylan fan. He had a harmonica that he got because he was into Bob Dylan. I have two older brothers, Mario and Louis, and they threatened me. They both had guitars: “Do not touch our guitars when we go out because they’re very expensive. We know you’re trying to get into the music thing too.” But there was a harmonica on the shelf and I figured, “Who’s going to know? I’ll just wipe it off when I’m done with it.” So I had this little love affair with the harmonica at age 14 and I never put it down.

And you’ve since performed with Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, and Whitney Houston.

Yeah, being in the New York area, I got into the music thing. My band would open up for B.B. King or Sly and the Family Stone, and I was quite young. I was 17, 18 years old. I met Bruce Springsteen when he was a young pup too. He was a little bit older than, but I would go down to Asbury Park, the Sunshine Inn, and my band would play with his band. I’ll show you in a minute how I taught Timmy with the harmonica rack, which is a thing that Bob Dylan made popular.

Bruce Springsteen saw me playing guitar with the rack one night and he said, “Man, Rob, you should come down to the Student Prince. I do a blues jam every Tuesday night.” And I’m thinking, “I’m an hour north in New Jersey, I’m not going to go down.” I never went. And two years later I saw him on the cover of Time and Newsweek and I said, “Maybe I should have went to that jam he was telling me about.”

So how did you get called into movie work, and eventually A Complete Unknown?

I got lucky. I learned how to read music on the harmonica, which a lot of harmonica players don’t know how to read music. So I started getting called for some movie soundtracks and Tom and Huck, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and that kind of stuff. I would go in and play the harmonica, but I never worked with actors before. This was my first time, with A Complete Unknown, working with an actor, coaching them to play, and it was a very interesting experience and I enjoyed it.

And you’d never seen a Timothée movie before.

It’s funny. While I was getting ready to start this project, I had to go to Japan with a band that I’ve worked with for years. The flight to Japan, it’s 13 hours. So I’m looking at the [in-flight movie] screen and it said Dune, Willy Wonka. I said, “I’m going to watch two of this guy’s films and see who he is.”

Well, tell me about your first impression meeting him, and of his harmonica skills. I heard he’d been prepping for five years.

I met him for the first time at his place in New York and he had about five or six harmonicas, so I could see that he was already playing. And when we put on some of the tracks, I said, “Who’s singing?” And he goes, “That’s me. I’m singing my own parts.” And I’m going, “Man, it sounds really good.” He had some chops on the harmonica. And when we were listening to the pre-recorded tracks that they were making for the soundtracks, I heard harmonica on that. And I said, “Is that you?” He goes, “Well, that’s the guy from the studio, Ross Garren.” I know Ross. The harmonica world is small. So Ross is a wonderful player who kind of took over for an old friend of mine, Tommy Morgan, who used to play on all the movies in California. And when he died two years ago, Ross kind of stepped in and became the guy in Burbank because he is a great player and he reads music and he’s just wonderful.

I had to teach Timmy a lot of those parts that Ross had put down on the soundtrack stuff. But he had already done a lot of coaching with Ross and some lessons based on the stuff that was played. And my job was, Timmy wants to get these parts right with his guitar and make sure he’s doing the right thing, but he really wanted to learn the parts. He didn’t want to fudge his way through it. He wanted me to show him how each riff went.

How did that prep go? Were you there on the sidelines as they’re filming it to step in, or did that happen beforehand?

I didn’t have to go to the set. Me and Larry [Salzman, the guitar coach], we met at Timmy’s place. We were doing some jamming. Timmy really wanted to get into this. He loved even Dylan stuff that wasn’t in the movies. He wanted to start playing it and show us that he knew these tunes.

What does Bob Dylan’s style of harmonica playing require from a performer?

Bob Dylan, as a singer and as a guitar player and as a harmonica player, as a musician, he was never a polished, trained musician. And that went to his harmonica as well. It was very quirky. It would go along with the songs and fit them perfectly. If you just took those harmonica parts and analyzed it musically, it’s not a whole lot. But then when you try to start copying that, that’s where it gets very difficult. The harmonica is an instrument where you blow in and out. So it becomes very personal. It sounds like the person that’s playing it.