Doja Cat Ripped Timothée Chalamet To Shreds Over His Claim That ‘No One Cares About’ Opera Or Ballet
Last week, Oscar-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet was under fire for having a very specific opinion about the arts: he believes “no one cares” about opera and ballet.
“I admire people—and I’ve done it myself—you want to talk about, hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive,” Chalamet said during a talk with fellow ‘Interstellar’ actor Matthew McConaughey. “You know, we gotta keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like, if people wanna see like ‘Barbie,’ like ‘Oppenheimer,’ they’re gonna go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. I don’t wanna be working in ballet, or opera, or things where, like, hey, keep this thing alive even though no one cares about this anymore.”
Chalamet followed up the comments by adding, “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost fourteen cents in viewership. Damn, I just took shots for no reason.”
What Chalamet didn’t expect was for people to care a whole lot more than he assumed they would.
Aside from some of the largest art institutions speaking out against his comments, other celebrities have stepped up to call him out, including singer Doja Cat.
Doja recorded a video of herself explaining how disrespectful she found Chalamet’s comments:
“Hey, by the way, opera is 400 years old,” Doja cat said in the video. “Ballet is 500 years old. Somebody named Timothee Chalamet had the nerve—big guy, by the way—had the nerve to say on camera that nobody cares about it. I’m sure you can watch into an opera theater right now, seats will be filled out, and nobody saying a word as the performance is going because everybody has that much respect for it.”
She continued on to say: “There is an etiquette around opera. There is etiquette around ballet. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing theater medium. It’s fucking beautiful. And people go there every day to the dance studio. Dancers show up 8 a.m., 6 a.m., whatever the fuck. They show up and they break and they bleed every single day, just because they have respect for it. They love it. They love what they do.”
But Doja Cat didn’t just stop there. She made a good point that something being a tough industry isn’t enough to write it off, especially when many industries are struggling at the moment.
“It doesn’t matter if the industry is having a tough time at any time, which a lot of industries have a tough time,” she said. “Your industry has a tough time. My industry has a tough time. Doesn’t mean people don’t care about it. People care. The dancers care. The singers care. The audience cares. They’re still an audience. People give a fuck.”
Doja Cat ended her video with a very specific call-to-action for Chalamet: “You show up in a nice outfit, you sit the fuck down, and you shut the fuck up. That’s the usual etiquette around those things. Maybe learn something from that.”