Timothée Chalamet is catching heat online after making a casual remark that ballet and opera are art forms “no one cares about” anymore.
The 30-year-old actor made the comment during a Feb. 24 town hall event at the University of Texas at Austin, where he reunited with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey for a conversation moderated by Variety and CNN. The discussion touched on the film industry’s current struggle to keep audiences engaged, with the pair noting how studios often feel pressured to front-load movies with big action sequences just to compete for attention.
Chalamet acknowledged the delicate balance filmmakers face in promoting serious work. “It does take you having to wave a flag of, ‘Hey, this is a serious movie,'” he said. “And some people do want to be entertained quickly.”
But it was his follow-up thought that sparked the backlash. The Oscar-nominated actor contrasted film with other performance arts, suggesting he wouldn’t want to work in fields that constantly have to beg for relevance. “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there,” he added, drawing laughter from the crowd.
Chalamet seemed to immediately sense the comment might land poorly, joking, “I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason.”
As it turns out, his instincts were right. In the days since the clip aired, several performers from the worlds of ballet and opera have voiced their disappointment. Grammy-winning opera singer Isabelle Leonard took to the comments section of the video to express her dismay, writing that she felt “shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow minded in his views about art while considering himself as artist.”
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