Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 9, 2026
Oh, Timmy. You were bound to stick your foot in your mouth at some point. Last week, an interview that Timothee Chalamet did a month prior with Matthew McConaughey went viral over some comments the actor made about ballet and opera. While discussing his film career and the push to keep the theatrical experience alive, Chalamet said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there […] I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason.”
It’s awards season and Academy voting just closed, so it was time for the current Best Actor frontrunner to face a little online backlash. Still, the way this one went viral among the cultural sector was unexpected. Opera and ballet performers and companies the world over clapped back. The responses were uniformly negative towards Chalamet, although there were also many people just having fun with the low-stakes drama of it all. Even my barre class instructor made jokes about him! He’s gotten more than a few offers for free tickets to some of the biggest opera productions on stage right now, which I’m a bit jealous of. All the Chalamet shade increased when other videos emerged of him making near-identical comments about opera and ballet being out of date or something nobody cares about. This seems to be his favourite comparison on matters of arts.
For what it’s worth, as I mentioned in my earlier piece on Chalamet’s comments, I don’t think he’s anti-ballet or opera, and I don’t believe his admittedly pipsqueak-esque line about ‘nobody caring’ was literal. Beneath the arrogance, he was getting at the wider issue of how many artforms become sidelined as attention and money is refocused to greener pastures. A hell of a lot of people don’t care about ballet. He wasn’t wrong. But that’s what made it all so aggravating. If people don’t care, it’s because we’ve told them time and time again that they don’t have to, that their proud refusal to try something new is a good thing.
It’s the glibness of it all, the laziness of the easy target and assumption that everyone will laugh along in agreement, that has bothered so many. Everyone has had that experience of someone dismissing the thing they love as “pointless” or something that “nobody cares about.” Oh, those romance novels? That sports team who always loses? That thing that was a trend a few years ago but you still partake in? Those are okay to mock, right? And ballet and opera? Which have been coded as rich people nonsense and stuff for little girls, and are misunderstood or outright ignored by most? It’s an easy shorthand for showing that you’re not a snob. Your interests are so much cooler, more relatable, more important, right?
In times of economic and cultural flux, the arts are often the first sector to face crushing cuts. Regardless of the political powers in charge and their grand promises of making things better for the average person, the assumption is that nobody will mind if funds are stripped from, say, your local art gallery or that touring theatrical company that puts on niche Shakespeare productions.
Ballet and opera are not the only examples of this problem but it is clear how often they’re thrown to the chopping block in a way that people can spin as an act of pro-working class solidarity. In 2022, the English National Opera’s public funding was cut to zero, and it inspired a slew of bad-faith discourse over how it wasn’t such a bad idea because most ‘normal people’ don’t care about opera. It was classism by another form, the notion that anyone of a certain wage bracket is simply too unsophisticated to be invested in something so elegant and old-fashioned. This is a common tactic of governments, a way to pretend that their ignorance is concern and not a desire to foster a wider sense of incuriosity (see every cut to arts and public media made by the Trump administration for further proof.) They’re frivolities amid the pain of a recession, and anyway, shouldn’t that be the concern of the private sector, we’re told. Let’s put the money to better use.
Of course, that claim is almost always a lie, as the money saved from arts cuts never goes towards improving healthcare or providing affordable public housing. And the cultural institutions that hang in there are forced to increase admission prices, sack employees, and move away from creatively risky endeavours. Suddenly, museums and theatres and films and education become the denizens of the wealthy. Going to see a musical costs hundreds of dollars for the worst seats. Corporations offer sponsorship but place conditions on what can be done with their money, and which political opinions can be expressed. Working-class and marginalized kids don’t get the chance to try out new arts and only those with familial connections or financial safety nets are able to get their foot in the door. And then there’s AI. F***ing AI, entrenching on every part of the arts, as desired by literally nobody who matters.
If anything good has come from this, it’s that seemingly every opera and ballet company with an Instagram account and petty streak for the publicity boost of the decade from it. A lot of attention was brought to their work. Some companies even offered discount tickets with Timmy’s name as a special code. It was all very bitchy and entertaining, but also a reminder that this is the kind of publicity that doesn’t typically befall the field. And isn’t that part of the problem? Opera and ballet aren’t at risk of irrelevance but the inaccessibility of them does perpetuate that idea. Arts cuts and elitism make it tough to bring in new crowds, and snide attitudes exacerbate that. How can you convince someone to take a risk on seeing a ballet if they’re instantly priced out of it, and all the government and cultural institutions at the top lock the doors behind them?
None of this is Timmy’s fault. He’s a theatre kid whose family includes a number of ballet dancers, so he knows how the system works. He’s just become the face of a bigger problem due to bad timing and social media flare-ups. Chalamet’s a smart guy when it comes to the film world. He’s a candidly ambitious man who is open about the kind of star he wants to be and what he has to do to achieve it.
Perhaps his numbskull comments are a good thing in helping those still wedded to the image of him as a sensitive anti-Hollywood artiste break free from that nonsense. Honestly, I think that’s another reason his comments went so viral. A hell of a lot of people are still besotted by the never-true persona of Chalamet as being a grand intellectual who’s not like the other boys. To those who have cherished the idea of Chalamet being like Laurie from Little Women or Elio from Call Me By Your Name, hearing him be a twerp in the most predictable way possible certainly punctures the dream. Never mind that Timothee himself has never actually pretended to be that kind of man. He takes his work seriously but is also a bro who likes sports, hot women, and winning awards, and that’s fine (and, again, stop blaming Kylie Jenner for his comments. What does she have to do with his poor taste?!)
I also think it’s worth noting how not all of the backlash to Chalamet’s comments has been particularly sincere. It’s award season. Timmy’s in backlash mode, and this was an easy comment to latch onto. There’s a reason we’re talking about it now and not a month ago when the interview was first released. It’s the same reason people are trying to start a war against Jessie Buckley for a comment she made about disliking cats. Disliking something proportionately is not a concept the internet is familiar with. I would hope that some of the must-go-viral outrage over Chalamet’s admittedly dumb comments would inspire some of those click-hunters to see an opera or ballet before they move onto the next topic to be mad about.
But he’s also going to have to swallow some humble pie on this issue. Ballet and opera have endured for centuries. They’ve outlived empires. Still, the grand issues at the heart of the ‘nobody cares’ assertion should be worked on beyond some catty Instagram posts. Greater investment in the arts, both financial and emotional, would do a lot of good for society, as would a greater willingness to be curious about the unknown. Maybe this whole thing will end with Chalamet doing a non-singing cameo in an opera production. He could do Nixon in China. That one has ping pong in it!
