Timothée Chalamet is in the crosshairs of ballet and opera performers.
The Oscar-nominated actor caused quite a stir last month during a live Variety and CNN town hall with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey.
At one point during the conversation, Chalamet made a flippant remark about the ballet and opera industries, which he considered to be irrelevant among the general population.
“I don't want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore,’” he said with a laugh. “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason."
Since then, numerous opera and ballet figures have publicly criticized Chalamet’s comments.
"Honestly, I'm shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow minded in his views about art while considering himself as an artist as I would only imagine one would as an actor,” Grammy-winning opera singer Isabel Leonard wrote, as reported by the Independent. "To take cheap shots at fellow artists says more in this interview than anything else he could say. Shows a lot about his character."
Opera singer Deepa Johnny echoed Leonard’s take, saying Chalamet’s remarks were “disappointing.”
“There is nothing more impressive than the magic of live theatre, ballet and opera,” Johnny wrote. “We should be trying to uplift these art forms, these artists and come together across disciplines to do that.”
Even the renowned Metropolitan Opera House responded with a TikTok captioned, “This one’s for you, Timothée Chalamet” alongside a compilation of everyone that makes the opera performances run smoothly, from carpenters to makeup artists.
Chalamet referenced ballet and opera while discussing audiences’ short attention spans and their media consumption habits. He acknowledged that many studios were front-loading the “biggest action set pieces” at the expense of slower-paced storytelling; however, he pointed out there were still some films that managed to “pull” audiences in despite saving the “fireworks” for the end.
“"It does take you having to wave a flag of, 'Hey, this is a serious movie,' or something, and some people do want to be entertained and quickly. I'm really right in the middle, Matthew. I admire people, and I've done it myself, who go on a talk show and say, 'Hey, we've got to keep movie theaters alive, we've gotta keep this genre alive,' and another part of me feels like if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they're going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it.