Deadline confirms a rumor that has been circulating since the beginning of the year:
Benedict Cumberbatch has joined the cast of A Complete Unknown , the Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold , previously titled Going Electric .
The English actor will play Pete Seeger , one of the greatest songwriters of American folk music, best known for songs such as Where Have All the Flowers Gone? , If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) and Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) . A left-wing political activist, he was a prominent protest songwriter in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as an early supporter of Bob Dylan .
Benedict Cumberbatch recently appeared in The Power of the Dog, Visionary World of Louis Wain, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . The protagonist of A Perfect Unknown will be Timothée Chalamet in the role of Dylan , while Elle Fanning will play Sylvie Russo , and Monica Barbarò will lend her face to Joan Baez .
The film will chronicle the beginnings of Bob Dylan , his arrival in New York in the early 1960s and his rise in the local folk scene. As the previous title suggests, in the biopic we will also see the artist’s participation in the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when his choice to switch to electric instruments caused a stir. The screenplay is by Jay Cocks ( Strange Days, Gangs of New York ), later revised by Mangold himself . The latter, director of Girls, Interrupted, Logan and Indiana Jones and the Quadrant of Destiny , has already directed the biopic of a great singer: When love burns the soul – Walk the Line , on Johnny Cash.
The producers
Executive producers are Bob Dylan , Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Andrew Rona . Longtime artist manager Jeff Rosen is producing with Mangold, Bob Bookman, Alan Gasmer, Peter Jaysen, Fred Berger and Alex Heineman . The studios involved are Veritas Entertainment Group, Automatik and The Picture Company .
We will keep you posted.