The Timothée Chalamet backlash certainly isn’t dying out as Ballet and Opera houses around the world come for his negative comments about those two specific forms of art. The now viral moment happened during his live Variety interview with Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey at The University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication. The Dune star opened up about how, in the past, while promoting movies on talk shows, he would ask audiences to attend to “keep movie theaters alive”, but now the actor seemed to backtrack his comments, explaining,
Another part of me feels like, if people wanna see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they’re gonna go see it and go out of their way and be loud and proud about it. And I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’ Even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.
Opera houses such as the English National Opera, Seattle Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera highlighted Chalamet in creative ways on their respective Instagram pages. The English National Opera posted screenshot of Chalamet’s infamous interview comment with a caption, “We’d love to change your mind- free tickets on us to help you fall back in love with opera anytime xoxo.” Even going as far as to tag the Marty Supreme actor’s Instagram. The Seattle Opera opted to use this free press for a good sale, using Chalamet’s first name as a promo code to save 14% on select seats for their production of Carmen, good for this weekend only. New York City’s Metropolitan Opera shared a video detailing the hard work and creativity that go into an opera production, captioning it, “This one’s for you @tchalamet…” Professional ballet dancer Amar Smalls also clapped back at Chalamet for his comments, saying,
People still care about ballet and opera. It’s just that the tickets for ballet and opera are just mad expensive. They are mad expensive because it’s high art. Tickets for movies that Timothée is in are cheap compared to ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘Swan Lake.’
Chalamet has been in the Oscar race for a few years now, being nominated for four Oscars in his career, two from this year’s Marty Supreme. When the film was first released in December, Chalamet’s performance received such high critical acclaim that it wasn’t really a question of whether he would be nominated. Though it is still a question whether he will win, these comments have seemed to harm him rather than help, as he seemed to think they would.
The Best Actor Oscar race has seemingly been taken over by Michael B. Jordan for his performance in Sinners, winning the Actor Award over Chalamet, but only time will tell who will take the prestigious award home.
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