Timothée Chalamet, 2026 Golden Globe recipient for his role in “Marty Supreme,” is receiving significant backlash for his comments last month on opera and ballet.
While discussing the ambition to “keep movie theatres alive” with actor Matthew McConaughey for Variety, the young actor criticized both industries for being ‘dying art forms.’
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’‘even though nobody cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.” Chalamet said.
As soon as the clip circulated on social media, comment sections ran and continue to run rampant with controversy. Major art institutions decided to weigh in on Chalamet’s assertion.
With over two million views, the Metropolitan Opera posted a compilation of the magnificent work that contributed to staging a production, with a title reading, “All respect to the opera (and ballet) people out there.” In the caption, the institution did not fail to elicit candor, writing, “This one’s for you, Timothée Chalamet.”
The Royal Ballet and Opera rendered a different approach, inviting him to attend their performances. Similarly, the Seattle Opera offered a 14% discount to see their production of “Carmen” using the promo code “TIMOTHEE.”
Industry support continued as American opera singer Isabel Leonard commented on Chalamet’s remarks.
“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,” Leonard said.
Rapper and singer Doja Cat took to TikTok to slam Chalamet. She later deleted the video, mentioning in a new post that she has never attended a ballet or opera performance herself.
“Hey, by the way, opera is 400 years old, ballet is 500 years old,” Doja Cat said. “Somebody named Tim-oh-tay Cha-lam-et had the nerve — big guy, by the way — had the nerve to say, on camera, that nobody cares about it.”
Chalamet’s remarks are quite tone deaf, given that both genres can be traced back all the way to the Italian Renaissance. They are very much alive today, so that’s some tough talk coming from someone who played a singing chocolate factory connoisseur.
It is outrageous that he lacks respect for ballet, given his mother, sister and grandmother were all ballerinas. Such art forms transcend time, have survived war, disease and famine. Opera was the world’s introduction to theatre and cinema. Without live stage performances, movies likely wouldn’t exist today.
The Chalamet debacle is a reflection of society’s attitude toward the arts. Last May, the National Endowment for the Arts was listed among a group of “small agency eliminations,” proposed by the Trump Administration’s 2026 Discretionary Budget Request — a category of funding that accounts for only 0.003% of the federal budget, as of 2022.
Ballet and opera offer something that movies do not: distinctiveness across performances. Go see “The Nutcracker” year after year, and something will always change; the casting, the costumes and the staging to name a few. Go see Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” a million times and determine who sounds most similar to Luciano Pavarotti or Maria Callas.
Distinctiveness exists across films, but casting, costumes and staging only change on the condition that a remake of the film is produced. That is not to say that films are not important. All art is important. But as an artist, Chalamet should understand better than anyone that diminishing other art forms is to reject other interpretations of the human condition.
