Timothee Chalamet Slammed as ‘Shallow’ on The View After Dissing Opera

“The View” hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin have blunt words for Timothée Chalamet regarding his thoughts on the state of ballet and opera. The “Marty Supreme” Oscar nominee told Matthew McConaughey during “A CNN & Variety Town Hall Event” that he didn’t want movie theaters to go the way of “ballet or opera,” where artists want to “keep this thing alive” even though “no one cares” about it anymore.

“Ballet is hard,” Hostin said during “The View’s” March 9 episode (via Entertainment Weekly). “I’m offended and disappointed in what he said. I didn’t realize he was that vapid and that shallow.”

Goldberg added, “You come from a dance family, so when you crap on somebody else’s art form, it doesn’t feel good. You probably didn’t realize until you said, ‘Oh, I’m in trouble,’ but then you compounded it and said, ’14 cents.’ No, when people get mad, it’ll be a lot more than 14 cents, so be careful. I’m just saying. Be careful, boy.”

“He is a boy to me,” she continued. “No disrespect. Really, don’t apologize when you’ve insulted. It doesn’t sound right. You can’t say, ‘Oh, this is dumb, no disrespect.’ That’s absolute disrespect.”

During his conversation with McConaughey, Chalamet said he admired actors who “go 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 and be loud and proud about it.”

“And I don’t want to 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,” Chalamet added. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

London’s Royal Ballet and Opera reacted to Chalamet’s viral diss by posting footage on Instagram of its craftspeople and performers and writing: “Every night at the Royal Opera House, thousands of people gather for ballet and opera. For the music. For the storytelling. For the sheer magic of live performance. If you’d like to reconsider, [Timothée Chalamet], our doors are open.” The English National Opera also invited Chalamet to a performance. The Seattle Opera made headlines for offering 14% off tickets for its production of “Carmen” with the promo code “Timothée.”

Dojo Cat also blasted Chalamet in a since-deleted TikTok post in which she said: “Opera is 400 years old. Ballet is 500 years old. Somebody named Tim-oh-tay Cha-lam-et had the nerve to say — on camera — that nobody cares about it. I’m sure you can walk into an opera theater right now, seats will be filled out, and nobody’s saying a word as the performance is going because everybody has that much respect for it.”