COVID was a bad time for most of Earth. Yet without mitigating the very real suffering experienced planet-wide, John Popper of Blues Traveler had an especially peculiar experience during the pandemic. And by peculiar, I mean he developed a phobia of Timothée Chalamet.
“I fell asleep to [2021’s] Dune and I kept having these fever dreams that Timothée Chalamet was a terminator coming to kill me,” Popper recounted in an interview with Rolling Stone. “And I would shoot him 100 times and he just kept coming back, and he was unstoppable.”
There are so many questions I’m not actually sure where to begin. At what exact moment did Popper actually fall asleep? Because at most, the first Dune sees Chalamet’s Paul Atreides fluctuate between scared little boy and junior badass-in-training. Beyond that, did Popper eat something spicy to somehow facilitate these dreams? And when he says “terminator,” did he imagine Chalamet’s body on a T-800 skeleton? And, lastly, if this Dune gave him nightmares, should he even attempt David Lynch’s bonkers 1984 version?
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This revelation came during Popper’s decidedly personal interview with Rolling Stone. He also discussed almost dying in 2025 following a botched surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome; how he met his new wife, Sherri “Gidget” Popper at a nudist colony in 2003; his continued sober journey; why Bob Dylan is rock’s worst harmonica player; and 2026 tour plans with Gin Blossoms and Spin Doctors. (Those bands previously played together in 2023 during a ’90s rock-themed party cruise.) Check out the full interview here.
Oh, and don’t worry too much about Popper’s bruised psyche. He eventually found a salve to turn Chalamet from a murderous terminator back into America’s brightest young star.
“It gave me a fear of Timothée Chalamet until I saw A Complete Unknown,” Popper said.