Steven Spielberg is the latest celebrity to weigh in on Timothée Chalamet’s hotly debated comments about ballet and opera.
Spielberg was speaking about the importance of movie theaters in his SXSW keynote speech when he took the jab. After saying that he values streaming and enjoys working with Netflix, he added, “But the real experience for me is when we can impact a community and bring all of us together in strange, strange, dark spaces. At the end of the painting experience, we all come together with a lot of emotion, and we go into the daylight together, and we go into the night together. And it happens in movies and in concerts. And it happens in ballets and operas.”
Spielberg grinned as the audience laughed and cheered. “And we want that to be sustained,” he continued. “We want it to last forever.”
Chalamet recently came under fire for joking about the demise of ballet and opera during a conversation with Matthew McConaughey on Variety and CNN’s Town Hall.
“I respect people who say, ‘We’ve got to keep movie theaters going. We’ve got to keep this genre going,'” he said. And another part of me feels that if people wanted to see it, like “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer,” they would go out of their way to see it and be loud and proud of it. I don’t want to work in ballet or opera where it’s like, “Please keep this going even though no one cares anymore,” but I respect the ballet and opera people who are there. ” Chalamet laughed, adding that he was “taking pictures for no reason,” and that dissing these art forms would cost the broadcast “14 cents in ratings.”
Multiple celebrities condemned his comments. Whoopi Goldberg called him “vain and shallow” on “The View,” and ballerina Misty Copeland accused him of disparaging ballet by including her in a marketing campaign for the film “Marty Supreme.” Other detractors named include Juliette Binoche, Andrea Bocelli, and Doja Cat, who later retracted her comments and admitted that she used the controversy to gain attention.
Essays in The New York Times and Vanity Fair have defended Chalamet, and journalists and even former opera singers have argued that Chalamet’s tone is insensitive, but that attendance and ticket sales for opera and ballet are in decline, and that Hollywood shouldn’t suffer the same fate.
