Timothée Chalamet was, until very recently, Hollywood’s golden boy and a frontrunner to win an Oscar this weekend – so is the recent backlash about more than his views on ballet and opera?
When Chalamet recently said “no-one cares” about ballet or opera any more, he clearly wasn’t expecting people to care enough about the remarks to ignite a furore. How wrong he was.
It turns out a lot of people have very strong feelings about ballet and opera, but even more so about Chalamet himself.
“He’s an absolute fool,” theatre critic and arts broadcaster Ian Brown told BBC Radio London on Saturday. “I just think he’s ridiculous, and I suspect that will come back to haunt him.”
Meanwhile, pop culture podcast The Spill titled its new episode “Why we’re officially done with Timothée Chalamet”, and posed the question: “Has the Timothée era officially come to a screeching halt?”
‘Cheap shots’
Chalamet’s comments may have been misjudged, but his crimes are pretty low-level in comparison with some of the wrongdoing that’s been perpetrated in Hollywood over the years.
In a lengthy interview last month with Matthew McConaughey, his on-screen dad from 2014’s Interstellar, Chalamet was apparently trying to make the point that he didn’t want cinemagoing to become a minority pursuit.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Keep this thing alive even though no-one cares about this any more’,” he said.
“All respect to the ballet and opera people out there,” he added hastily, realising how his words may go down. “I just lost 14 cents in viewership. Damn, I just took shots for no reason.”
Ballet and opera artists and companies mounted a strong defence.
“To take cheap shots at fellow artists says more in this interview than anything else he could say,” US opera singer Isabel Leonard responded. “Shows a lot about his character.”
Some also smartly capitalised on the attention, with Seattle Opera offering 14% off tickets to Carmen using the promo code TIMOTHEE. “Timmy, you’re welcome to use it too,” they said.
