Boyd Holbrook and Monica Barbaro, who play Johnny Cash and Joan Baez, respectively, in A Complete Unknown, were interviewed by IndieWire on they preparation to portray the folk music icons.
You can read below Boyd’s part. Click here to read the full interview:
In the film, Kentucky-hailing Boyd Holbrook offers a short but memorable presence as Johnny Cash, one of Dylan’s idols before the folk singer superseded even the Nashville “I Walk the Line” singer. Though you can’t exactly say Holbrook’s is a sharp one, as his Cash is fully dulled-out on drugs or drink in his handful of standout scenes.
“How do you play drunk, man? That has been a question for 15 years,” he told IndieWire. “Since I started studying acting. That’s been one big conversation — accents, impediments, really. Dialects, drunk, you start cracking that stuff. I started thinking about it and have done it bad and hopefully got it wrong a couple times. … The great thing about acting is that I catch myself daydreaming about scenes. I’ll be doing the dishes or working on a deck or something like that, and you’re lost in thought, and then that’s it. Then, you have to go rehearse it. There’s a line in [the movie], ‘I saw the ocean,’ I knew exactly how fucked-up this guy is. To choose that to talk about how meaningful that was, or what an event it was for him.”
No, you’re not sober if you’re saying that to Bob Dylan, and on that time of day. It takes you a minute to realize this is Boyd Holbrook on the screen. There’s a prosthetic nose, there’s eyebrows, there’s hair, a whole look meant to make him convincingly as Johnny Cash as possible. Holbrook worked with a makeup artist named Stacey Panepinto.
“At the beginning, I told Jim [Mangold], I don’t look like Johnny Cash. He said very straightforward, ‘Nobody looks like anybody.’ And that’s true once you start breaking down all of us, but you start adding things and making an impression of a person that gives an essence of that,” the actor said. “There’s a real weaving and bobbing until you kind of have got the voice down, listened to his cadence and his dialect so much that I create my own version of that, and I have this impression of the physicality, without it being like, ‘Wait a second, what’s going on there?’ Because then it’s like a ventriloquist, really.”
Holbrook is indeed weaving and bobbing out of the movie, sauntering drunkenly into and out of scenes. Because of “A Complete Unknown,” Holbrook now said he will be “forever able to play music,” as he sharpened his guitar and singing skills after pretending to be a better musician than he actually is for the audition. “I couldn’t do that at the beginning of this project. I can count and stay in time now. … I had a couple months of buffer time before I started having to send those [audition] tapes in,” he said.
Cash has a number of living relatives, but Holbrook didn’t go after a blessing from any of them to create his performance. “The script is the bible, and at this point, I know what I need to do, and I could’ve gotten somebody’s blessing, I guess, but it’s still not John’s blessing. I hope they feel we’ve celebrated their loved one’s life, and that I did justice to these legends and these icons without cementing their legacy — I don’t ever want to tarnish anything. It was my goal from the beginning to celebrate them. Hopefully they feel that way.”