Timothée Chalamet puts his own spin on Bob Dylan's hidden gems on SNL: Watch

The majority of the crowd was, well, utterly unaware of the Bob Dylan songs that Timothée Chalamet chose for his musical engagement on Saturday Night Live.

While his selections defied expectations that he would recreate songs he sang as Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which turned out to be the furthest thing from his mind, the actor’s foray into more esoteric choices surprised many Dylanologists who tuned in.

Chalamet hinted that the selections made during his musical section might surprise the audience in his introductory monologue as host.

“You might not know the Bob Dylan songs I’m performing, but they’re my personal favorites,” he told the audience. “I’m so grateful ‘Saturday Night Live’ is still doing weird stuff like this 50 years in. They’re either really nice for letting me do this or incredibly mean and this is all a big prank.”

To the pleasure of expectant music lovers, Chalamet was joined on keyboards for the musical parts by the well-known singer-songwriter James Blake in an unannounced cameo.

Wearing sunglasses and a winter coat with a hood over his head, the Dune star launched into two songs back-to-back for his first musical appearance in the show, making it immediately clear that he intended to perform in his own voice and have some irreverent fun with it.

Chalamet performed a brief, lively, and audacious medley of Outlaw Blues and Three Angels during that debut, two songs that are well-known to true Dylan fans but have never been included on a greatest-hits album. 

When Chalamet returned later in the concert to sing a third Dylan song, he adopted a more restrained approach, but he continued to stay to the extensive catalogue and avoid an overt Dylan vocal style. 

Tomorrow Is a Long Time, which Dylan initially sang live and demoed in 1962 but didn't release in any form until the 1970s, despite being covered by numerous other artists in the 1960s, was the song he performed to end the evening.