NEW YORK – Hollywood movie star Timothee Chalamet will be both the host and musical guest on the Jan 25 episode of sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL), broadcaster NBC announced on Jan 10. This puts the 29-year-old French-American actor among the rarefied group of performers who have been asked to play both roles on a single episode.
Chalamet’s appearance, which will be his third stint as host, comes amid a glitzy promotional run and Oscars campaign for the biopic A Complete Unknown, in which he plays a young Bob Dylan, the iconic American singer-songwriter.
The film, which uses Chalamet’s vocals, re-creates the performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island when Dylan went electric. The film is slated to open in Singapore cinemas in February.
It was unclear as at the afternoon of Jan 10 whether Chalamet would perform any songs by Dylan. NBC did not immediately return a request for comment.
Critical opinion of the film has been somewhat divided, but Dylan seemed to give the film a thumbs-up when he posted on social platform X that Chalamet was “brilliant”. That did not spare Chalamet from some gentle ribbing at the Golden Globes on Jan 5, however.
“Dude, you were so good in A Complete Unknown as Bob Dylan,” show’s host Nikki Glaser riffed in her opening monologue. “In fact, I actually read that your singing voice was so accurate that even Bob Dylan himself admitted that it was absolutely horrible.”
Chalamet’s turn as both host and musical guest in the same episode puts him in a group of fewer than 50 people who have pulled “double duty”, according to NBC.
He will join the likes of music acts such as The Rolling Stones, Olivia Newton-John, Jennifer Lopez, Janet Jackson, Billie Eilish and, most recently, Charli XCX in November. Even rarer are SNL musical guests who are not professional singers, a list that includes actor Gary Busey, actress Lily Tomlin and American football coach Deion Sanders.
NBC also announced that comedian Dave Chappelle would host the first show of the year on Jan 18, with GloRilla, a rapper from Memphis, Tennessee, scheduled to be the musical guest.
Chappelle hosted the post-presidential election episodes in 2016 and 2020, but in November 2024, that gig went instead to a different comedian, Bill Burr. NYTIMES
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