Oh Great, Jamie Lee Curtis Has Weighed In
How has everyone reacted to Timothée Chalamet’s comments about ballet and opera?
More from Hung Up this week: Who Is This Year’s Oscar Villain? … ‘Hamnet’ If It Were Good … and don’t miss the paywalled Oscar ceremony chat this Sunday!
“Oh great, just what we needed,” I thought to myself Wednesday afternoon. “I have been dying to know what Jamie Lee Curtis thinks of all this.” In a February conversation with Matthew McConaughey — already a specious beginning — Timothée Chalamet expressed the anxiety that the pitch for watching movies in a theater (“It’s important! Keep this art form alive!”) will become as esoteric as the pitch for seeing ballet or opera. The reaction to his comments has been minimal. The reaction to a misrepresentation of his comments has been extreme.
“I admire people, and I’ve done it myself, who go on a talk show and go, ‘Hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive. You know, we gotta keep this genre alive,’” Chalamet told McConaughey during the CNN and Variety town hall. “And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it.” Okay, so far, so good.
And then the offhanded remark that has resulted in mass psychosis on the level of Huda Mustafa. “I don’t want to 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,’” Chalamet said. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.” Your mileage may vary on the cheeky (or meanspirited) joke that followed: “I just lost 14 cents in viewership,” he said. “I just took shots for no reason.”
There could be some debate here: Did he say “I don’t want to 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,” or did he say “I don’t want to 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.” Was “no one cares about this anymore” part of that hypothetical, or was it a declarative statement that Timothée Chalamet does not care about ballet, that Timothée Chalamet does not care about opera, that Timothée Chalamet only cares about movies?
Perhaps it’s not productive to split hairs — the latter is what many people heard. While I can’t wait to see the Ticketmaster bloodbath for any ballet or any opera (and I say this as someone who has gone to the ballet twice in the last year in two different countries, thanks to my friend and ballet aficionado Luke!), I suspect that people aren’t actually defensive of art “no one cares about anymore,” but are rejecting what has become effectively a 23-month press tour. Dune 2 was released in March 2024; the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown was released in December 2025, and Marty Supreme just a year later. Chalamet led them all, and two were Oscar contenders. Can anyone survive three back-to-back press tours without overexposure?
I wonder, too, if the Complete Unknown promo cycle was at the detriment of Marty Supreme. A Complete Unknown is such an embarrassingly conventional biopic for a musician that has been anything but; James Mangold got all of his feminism out in Girl, Interrupted and said “that’s enough of that.” Is it too much to ask of an audience or a voter that Chalamet fully devoted himself to practicing guitar and harmonica, that he performed Dylan songs on Saturday Night Live, that he successfully run the failed Kamala 2024 campaign … only to tell a version of the same story of total monastic dedication a year later? (He reportedly brought a table tennis table to the set of every movie he filmed as he prepped for Marty Supreme, including Dune: Part Two and Wonka.)
