The curtain is yet to drop on Timothée Chalamet’s ballet and opera fiasco, with Whoopi Goldberg, Doja Cat and theatre stars weighing into the ongoing debate.
This month, the Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme actor, 30, has angered those in the arts community after telling Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey in a resurfaced interview that “no one cares” about ballet or opera.
Speaking about keeping the movie industry alive, Chalamet said at the Variety/CNN event in February: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”
He added: “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there, I just lost 14 cents in viewership, I just took shots for no reason.”
The clip went viral on social media, attracting backlash from opera and ballet stars online as well as rapper Doja Cat and actor Jamie Lee Curtis.
While Chalamet is just days away from learning whether he’s won the Best Actor Oscar for Marty Supreme, the controversy continues to rage on – with Whoopi Goldberg becoming the latest star to criticise his comments.
Speaking on US chat show The View on Tuesday (10 March), the award-winning actor told Chalamet: “Be careful, boy. He is a boy to me. No disrespect. You can’t say, ‘Oh, this is dumb, no disrespect.’ That’s absolute disrespect.”
She added: “You come from a dance family, so when you crap on somebody else’s art form, it doesn’t feel good.”
Several members of Chalamet’s family have dance backgrounds, with both his mother and grandmother having trained with the New York City Ballet. Meanwhile, his sister – actor Pauline Chalamet – attended the School of American Ballet.
Chalamet has received criticism from those in the arts across the world – with British opera star Camilla Kerslake calling his comments “shocking and hurtful” to the community.
“He’s Oscar-nominated, he’s had his zenith and then he decided to punch downwards,” she told The Independent.
The operative singer, who is married to Strictly Come Dancing star Chris Robshaw, received a Classic Brit Award nomination in 2010 for Album of the Year and starred as Cosette in Les Miserables in the West End.
Kerslake said that the actor’s comments were particularly disappointing considering just how much work it takes to make it in ballet and opera.
“I’ve worked across a huge section of the industry but I have never worked in any industry that’s even come close to as hard as operative stage work,” she said.
“It’s very strange to be completely disregarded. Ballerinas break their bodies and when I’m at an opera house, I’m rehearsing for eight hours a day. It’s a very immature take. He’s 30 – he’s too old to be making these comments.
“I wonder if his mother had some stern words to say to him after that because I can’t imagine my sons – who are running around opera houses all the time – saying something disparaging about opera.”
Despite the uproar, the controversy has united the artistic community. New York City’s Metropolitan Opera took a swipe at Chalamet in a video, posting a montage of its employees with the caption: “This one’s for you, Timothée Chalamet...”
A spokesperson for the Royal Ballet and Opera also highlighted ballet and opera’s impact on cinema, saying: “Ballet and opera have never existed in isolation, they have continually informed, inspired, and elevated other art forms.”
Kerslake added: “I personally do not believe that he deserves to be cancelled because of this. I would like to think that he’s been educated slightly.
“The only good thing to come from all of this is how galvanised the industry has been by it. The biggest opera houses in the world are posting stuff,” she said. “It’s an incredibly old art form, it’s over 400 years old and it can potentially be a little bit stuffy. I feel like this has given the industry an excuse to bounce back and say, ‘Absolutely not, we’re not going to have this.’”
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