The uproar over Timothée Chalamet's comments on opera and ballet may have subsided, but the director of his breakout film, Call Me by Your Name, has come to his defense. Luca Guadagnino spoke to Italian daily La Stampa over the weekend, ahead of the premiere of his adaptation of John Adams' 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, in Florence.
The filmmaker, whose 2017 age-gap romance catapulted Chalamet into the mainstream and earned him his first Oscar nomination, touched on the actor's viral faux pas earlier this year, where he said "no one really cares" about ballet or opera. (Such was the public outrage that it was Conan O'Brien's opening quip at March's Academy Awards.)
Guadagnino conceded that the star "could have spared himself." In an interview translated from Italian, he told La Stampa: "I am not on social media and don't understand how one [single] comment can become a planetary polemic. Maybe Timothée could have spared himself. But he's young, smart, sensitive, and he fears that cinema could become marginal. And that's exactly why every form of imagination should be nurtured. We must unite the arts, not separate them," Guadagnino added.
The pair haven't worked together since 2022's Bones and All, in which Chalamet co-starred with Taylor Russell. The young actor was hoping to earn his first Oscar for his performance in Josh Safdie's ping-pong caper Marty Supreme, but a bold awards campaign took a nosedive in early March, unhelped by Chalamet's opera-ballet comments.
"I don't want to be working in ballet or opera where it's like, 'Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore,'" he said with a laugh in a live conversation with Matthew McConaughey for Variety and CNN. "All respect to the ballet and opera people out there... I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I'm taking shots for no reason."
American opera singer Isabel Leonard responded at the time: "Honestly, I'm shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow-minded in his views about art while considering himself as [an] artist as I would only imagine one would as an actor," while Canadian opera performer Deepa Johnny called it a "disappointing take."
She continued: "There is nothing more impressive than the magic of live theatre, ballet and opera. We should be trying to uplift these art forms, these artists and come together across disciplines to do that."
Chalamet will next be seen in December's highly anticipated Dune conclusion from Denis Villeneuve.
