Timothée Chalamet, a Best Actor nominee for this week’s Oscars, has found himself at the center of yet another cyclone of contention that swirled over the weekend. The actor, nominated for his performance in the Best Picture nominee Marty Supreme, has dedicated the past several months to taking any chance he can get to promote the movie—directed by Josh Safdie, loosely based on the real life of table tennis player Marty Reisman in 1952. Included among these activities—which have literally taken him to new heights, including standing on top of both the Empire State Building and the Sphere in Las Vegas—have been a number of interviews and conversations with journalists and fellow actors. In a recent public chat with Matthew McConaughey, Chalamet’s former co-star in Interstellar, the two thespians ruminated on the future of the film industry. However, in doing so, Chalamet wound up making a dismissive comment that earned him the ire of the seemingly calmest people alive: ballet dancers and opera performers. This was just the final pointe shoe to drop after a monthslong buildup to take the actor down a peg in the run-up to the Academy Awards this Sunday. So just how did one off-ballerina-blush-colored joke earn him a reprimand from the chorus? Read on to find out.
What did Timothée Chalamet say, exactly? And when?
Our story begins with a Feb. 21 conversation between Chalamet and McConaughey in the form of a “Town Hall” chat, organized by Variety and celebrity.land, at the University of Texas at Austin. When the full hourlong discussion became available to stream online, it generated some viral clips, like one of Chalamet bringing up a video of McConaughey and his other former co-star, Austin Butler, talking really close to each other.
Over this past weekend, though, a different segment of the conversation went viral. Though this bit was circulating online earlier, it wasn’t until Seth Abramovitch, a journalist at the Hollywood Reporter, reposted the sound bite on X on March 5 that it took off like a rocket. Abramovitch wrote “Ok, I did not hear this. This sucks,” reposting a moment when McConaughey asks Chalamet if the young actor had noticed a trend of Hollywood expediting storytelling to account for low attention spans in moviegoers. McConaughey outlines Hollywood studios’ fears that people won’t watch movies if something doesn’t immediately excite them, to which Chalamet responds:
I admire people—and I’ve done it myself, too, gone on a talk show and go, Hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive, you know, we gotta keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like, if people wanna see it—like Barbie, like Oppenheimer—they’re gonna go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. And I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera, or 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. I just lost 14 cents in viewership … I just took shots for no reason.
When McConaughey says he understands what Chalamet is trying to say, there’s another pregnant pause before Chalamet awkwardly bursts into song as a joke.
Ok I did not hear this. This sucks pic.twitter.com/O2ZW26zHrb
— Seth Abramovitch (@SethAbramovitch) March 5, 2026
Yikes. That sound bite doesn’t come off well, even if there is a degree of truth to his larger point.
It’s pretty well known that some traditional Western art forms—ballet, opera, classical music, etc.—have been struggling financially for a while now. Reckoning with the reasons these disciplines suffer from low attendance compared to their counterparts in mass popular culture is a valid point to speak to, certainly. But it is also easy to see how dismissing these art forms, even jokingly, as crafts that no one cares about would be offensive to the many people who do. It certainly doesn’t help that Chalamet apparently recognized that he made an offhand offensive comment “for no reason,” but didn’t apologize, instead laughing awkwardly afterward. Unfortunately, what is being lost in the ire that this comment sparked are the really salient questions the two actors are trying to navigate, about how the current state of storytelling might cheapen the art form as a whole.
Also, plenty of people are pointing out how interesting it is to hear Chalamet say this, considering he comes from a family of ballerinas.
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Wait—he does?
A few months ago, earlier in the promotional press run for Marty Supreme, Chalamet told an interviewer: “My grandmother danced in the New York City Ballet, my mother danced in the New York City Ballet, my sister danced in the New York City Ballet. I grew up dreaming big backstage at the Koch Theater in New York.” This family background could provide some context for how intimately familiar Chalamet would be with the dance medium’s problems, though it doesn’t necessarily excuse how dismissively he relayed them. This is particularly true considering that Marty Supreme has, in some ways, leaned on the ballet community for promo. When the film’s marketing team mounted their “Dream Big” campaign, the phrase being the film’s tagline, they did so by getting a bunch of notable figures who have broken boundaries in their field to don the now-iconic Marty Supreme jackets. One of the earliest celebrities tapped for this campaign was Misty Copeland, the first African American female principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre.
However, the additional irony here is that this isn’t the first time Chalamet has said something like this. Someone posted a compilation on X that comprises clips of him from as early as 2019 speaking on his fears that cinema might become an “outdated” or “dying art form” like opera or ballet. It appears that this has been something of a talking point of his for years.
Has he or anyone else responded?
Chalamet himself hasn’t. In fact, somewhat hilariously, every new video of him that has surfaced since this scandal blew up over the weekend shows him completely ignoring the controversy while promoting Marty Supreme in China. He’s too busy having fun overseas, facetiously serving tofu in markets, playing Ping-Pong, and dancing with the elderly.
Though, there is one demographic that has responded: ballet and opera organizations, naturally. The Metropolitan Opera posted a video to Instagram, directly tagging Chalamet, of some footage of all of the labor that makes their productions possible, with the caption “All respect to the opera (and ballet) people out there.” The Los Angeles Opera promoted their production of Akhnaten by shading Chalamet with an Instagram post captioned, “Sorry, @tchalamet. We’d offer you complimentary tickets to Akhnaten, but it’s selling out. There are a few seats left to purchase if you hurry.” The Paris Opera posted a clip of their current production of Nixon in China with a caption that translates to: “Plot twist: ping-pong also exists in opera.” Some dancers with the New York City Ballet also responded, including Megan Fairchild and Sara Mearns. The Vienna State Opera took to the streets to ask strangers if they care about opera. Other production companies, like the Royal Ballet and Opera, have taken this moment as an opportunity to not only chide Chalamet for his comments, but to welcome him to see their productions.
In a way, Chalamet’s comments actually brought some awareness to these so-called “dying” art forms by creating a talking point they could respond to and market on. And hopefully this can help them make some money. Some companies understand that, like the Seattle Opera, which promoted a deal for their current production of Carmen that saved concertgoers 14 percent off select seats if they used the code “TIMOTHEE.” And support for these art forms has also come from unexpected places, like popular singer/rapper Doja Cat, who posted a video shaming Chalamet for his remarks, and the hosts of The View, one of whom called Chalamet “vapid” and “shallow.”
I’m surprised that this has blown up the way it has. But now that I think about it, it feels like Chalamet’s name has been mired in a lot of controversy lately. Is that true or is that just me?
It’s not just you, though I should remind you that he’s been in the press more generally lately due to his Oscars campaign. Still, it’s the law of the net-based universe: Anything that gains massive popularity, despite publicists’ best efforts, is certain to eventually have an online hate train follow. This awards season, Chalamet’s choo-choo of chastisement began with some irritation over how he discussed his overly dedicated acting process, much to the chagrin of people who voiced that he was coming off as too pretentious, too actor-y. Then, he embarked on a tour de force of a marketing campaign for the film, one that birthed a streetwear fashion trend, a collaboration with a prominent Black content creator, and even a feature on a legitimate popular rap song from a massive up-and-coming English rapper. Chalamet’s toe-dipping into Black culture—a habit that is not new to this season of his life by any means—earned some skeptical looks from Black onlookers, who accused him of temporarily putting on a “wigga” personality to accumulate hype in order to sell tickets.
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All of this, though it earned a few skeptical raised eyebrows, was ultimately fine … until the awards race positioned him against a beloved Black actor, Michael B. Jordan, as the two likely front-runners for Best Actor along the awards circuit. It was then that controversy started to bubble up alleging that awarding Chalamet for his performance—one he was accused of cosplaying as a Black person to promote—over an actual Black actor was racist. (That, itself, is a layered, thorny conversation that I’ve already teased apart here.)
In other words, the Chalamet controversy had already been snowballing downhill, and this ballet/opera comment was merely fresh snow on the ground to add to the mass. But it’s not surprising that this made people as irate as it did, not only because being annoyed with Chalamet seems to be a trendy enough outlook these days, but also because this is perhaps the first time Chalamet has “taken shots”—whether he meant to or not—at the demographic that catapulted him to fame in the first place: women. Insulting ballet, specifically, a profession that is predominantly carried out by women and has meant something to the women of his own family, could easily feel like a slap in the face to the same group that uplifted Chalamet’s performances in the queer and women-led films, like Call Me By Your Name and Little Women, that gave Chalamet his start. No matter how much he goes on ESPN’s College GameDay or indulges in the bro-ification of the self to promote his increasingly masculine roles, he can’t erase his start as a heartthrob of the female gaze.
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Speaking of the Chala-melee of this awards season, I’ve been hearing murmurs about this kerfuffle costing him an Oscar. Is that true?
It’s not impossible that this whole issue could’ve cost Chalamet a few votes, but it is unlikely, given the timing of it. The conversation has been up for a few weeks, but Ambramovitch’s viral tweet was posted just a couple of hours before Oscars voting closed on March 5. The late timing, combined with the assumption that most Academy voters didn’t wait until hours before the deadline to cast their ballots, makes it very unlikely that this whole scenario cost him many votes, if any (despite what Polymarket and Kalshi predictions might have you believe). This is, in many ways, different than the Jessie Buckley feline smear campaign that emerged recently, which felt more like it was the work of some publicist twirling their mustache behind the scenes.
However, that doesn’t mean that the backlash that has been building against Chalamet for some time now wouldn’t have contributed to Chalamet’s current lower odds of winning the little gold man. Currently, gold-standard awards prediction site Gold Derby has the likelihood of Michael B. Jordan winning the award at a 53.7 percent chance, and Chalamet at a mere 32.2 percent chance.
Whether or not he does win, Chalamet will be fine. I agree with this tweet from culture journalist Caroline Siede that predicts that once the actor grows his iconic curls back, people will calm down again—something Siede funnily dubs “a real Samson scenario.” But she’s maybe right, for reasons that hark back to my earlier point: Chalamet’s feminine edge is what assuaged any of his pretentiousness and changed it into something else, something more mysterious and softer around the edges. He just needs to be in a movie helmed by a woman again and all will be well. Greta Gerwig, we need you!
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source slate.com ’
