With the Oscars closing out the awards season earlier this month, one of the most heated controversies leading up to the ceremony was Timothée Chalamet’s infamous comment about ballet and opera. I stumbled across his statement in the many clips and videos cut from his Variety & CNN Town Hall conversation with Matthew McConaughey. There were thousands of comments and online discussions about his remarks, with the majority criticizing Chalamet. However, upon taking a closer look at the video, as well as Chalamet’s Oscar campaign for his film “Marty Supreme,” I feel as if the internet’s reactions toward him are coming from a place other than simple criticism.
The statement that got Chalamet into hot water was, “And I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, 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.” Of course, looking at just that comment itself, he seems to be dismissing ballet and opera. It also didn’t help when he added that “no one cares about this anymore,” when clearly, from the overwhelming responses of the community attacking Chalamet’s comment, he was wrong. However, among all those clips of his statement that have gained enormous circulation on platforms, I rarely see people talking about the rest of his conversation.
In the video, McConaughey and Chalamet discussed a variety of topics related to their acting careers. Right before the section that got clipped, Chalamet mentions the pressure during press tours, where he, like many others, has to hone in on the message to “keep theatres alive.” He was addressing a common message that stars have been repeating in their post-pandemic press junkets, where everyone in Hollywood is trying to get people to watch their movies in cinemas. As the last few years have shown, streaming services, as well as the plummeting economy, have decreased the incentive for audiences to watch movies in theatres.
He was making a comparison between this pressure and the pressure people in the ballet and opera communities might feel due to a decline in viewership and popularity in those art forms. Chalamet’s statement that ballet and opera are dying art forms isn’t untrue. The New York Times reports that in 2018, the number of performances had decreased compared to 1998, and the share of operating revenue generated by ticket sales had fallen to 33% that year — and these were pre-pandemic figures. As for ballet, the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who attended a live, in-person ballet performance was 1.9%. Although this doesn’t mean that “no one cares about this anymore,” it definitely shows that ballet and opera have significantly decreased in popularity.
That being said, when focusing on people’s comments on his statements, a common thread I see in most of the videos is how people say he’s Timothy now, not Timothée. This idea is indicative of a change in Chalamet’s image, as fans seem to want the younger, pre-Kylie Jenner Timothée back, with comments like “he used to look so good,” and videos comparing his current photos to pre-buzzcut ones. Much of this reaction comes from dissatisfaction beyond his ‘ballet and opera’ comments, directed more toward his appearance and ‘personality’ change.
This shift in his physical appearance began last year, when he grew out a mustache for his role in “Marty Supreme” and got a buzzcut for the new “Dune” film. There seems to be a romanticization of 2018 Timothée Chalamet. For a long time after the success of “Call Me By Your Name,” Chalamet skyrocketed in popularity as the internet’s soft, artsy boyfriend, gaining many fangirls who were infatuated with that image of him. Yet now, with him taking on projects that slowly distance him from that picture, people are “mourning” the ‘é’ in his name. In Chalamet’s “Marty Supreme” campaign trail, he promoted the film with a very different version of himself, departing from the soft, romantic boyfriend image he had before. From the “Marty Supreme” marketing video that also gained circulation, where Chalamet plays an insufferable star personality (much like his character in the film), to collaborating with anonymous British rapper EsDeeKid, Timothée Chalamet has been leaning into a new persona quite loudly.
Honestly, I don’t think the criticisms toward him are unwarranted, especially given how he worded his comments. However, most of these netizens who circulate those out-of-context clips of him aren’t really patrons of those art forms; it seems they are only hopping onto a hot controversy without actually watching the conversation as a whole. Moreover, those fangirls who are mad at Chalamet need to realize that they are not entitled to a certain version of someone. “Call Me By Your Name” Timothée Chalamet is still “Marty Supreme” Timothée Chalamet — he has always been the same person. Fans do not get to pick and choose. If you don’t like him in his buzzcut-mustache era, you don’t deserve him in his softboy-with-long-locks phase.
