The Timothee Chalamet HATE TRAIN Won't Stop

The Timothee Chalamet hate train shows no signs of stopping. I feel like I am detached from reality because it really was only last month that the entire industry turned against Timothee Chalamet for his comments, dismissing the importance of ballet and opera in the big 26. And now we're well into April and Charlize Theron suddenly decided it was time to respond to those comments. But since it's been so long in Internet years, we should remind you of what he originally said. This is the clip. Do you know before we even play? You know what it reminds me of? It's kind of like the game of telephone that happened with Sidney Sweeney's jeans ad, where by the time it was done, she was basically Sig Heiling, even though that's not what happened in the ad. Right. Let's let's listen to what he said. And 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. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. But I just took shots for no reason. That's not a shot. I hear what you're saying. Yeah. OK. So even Matthew McConaughey saw his point in the moment and said, you're not taking shots at them. I see what you're trying to say. He was definitely nervous laughing. He was nervous laughing. He he's part of the he's still part of the club. And he understands that in Hollywood, you're not allowed to not like stuff. You can't like it's like I always personally. It's like I always say about it's the reason why certain actors are certain actors and directors are allowed to critique and certain ones aren't. But that's just the way most of them are not allowed to pretend like they don't like like they like they have to pretend like they like everything. I mean, I get why, you know, movie studios have to pretend that all of their projects are successes. Quentin Tarantino and his. Quentin Tarantino is allowed to critique things because he's Quentin Tarantino and it's part of his shtick. Yeah. But everybody else. Right. To be the ranting, raving hobo of your industry. If you're Quentin Tarantino. But for the rest of them, that rule certainly does not apply. But yeah, I mean, of course, you know, Disney has to pretend that all of their movies make money. But I don't understand why an actor has to pretend that ballet and opera are still booming in popularity in 2026 when that is just objectively not the reality. And Charlize Theron was asked to respond to his comments in a recent interview with The New York Times. I believe it was the same interviewer who was trying to go to Jennifer Lawrence into a comment about Trump. The other month, and it worked on Charlize Theron this time, she said. Well, she started off with more a comment about about dance, which was required of her in a past role. She said dance is probably one of the hardest things I ever did. Dancers are superheroes, what they put their bodies through. And the interviewer alluded to Chalamet's comments about ballet and opera, to which she replied, I hope I run into him one day. That was a very reckless comment on an art form, two art forms that we need to lift up constantly because, yes, they do have a hard time. But in 10 years, AI is going to be able to do Timothy's job, but it will not be able to replace a person on a stage dancing live. And we shouldn't ---- on other art forms. Dance taught me discipline, structure, hard work. It taught me to be tough. It's borderline abusive. There were several times that I had blood infections from blisters that never healed. And you don't get a day off. I'm literally talking about bleeding through your shoes. And that's something that you have to practice every single day. The mindset of just you don't give up. There's no other option. You keep going. And it's really, again, missing the point almost intentionally of what, you know, it's absolutely. So what it is, she had something she wanted to say and she just fit it into what it was that she wanted to talk about. Which was how difficult in her past work has been. It didn't matter what he actually said. Just in the same way, it didn't matter what Sydney Sweeney actually said in her stupid jeans at all that mattered is they had something they wanted to say so they could say it. And if I was to give it like a fair shake and be like, OK, she's she misunderstood what he said when really I don't even think that's what it is. It's far more reckless to pretend like nothing is wrong and to just, you know, shout from the high heavens how great everything is when clearly it isn't because then you fail to see where you can make changes. Now, that's a foregone conclusion for dance and for theater and for ballet and those things they've got. They've moved on to becoming niche forms of entertainment, right? Hollywood is trending that direction with movies and television. But you don't have to pretend to love it now. You can talk about what needs to be fixed, because heaven forbid, if you actually make some changes and fix some of the things that need to be fixed, that's what you need to do. It's far more egregious to focus on or to pretend like everything's right when it's not. Over this past weekend, I did attend an opera for the second time in my entire life and didn't enjoy this one as much as the first that I attended, but that's not really relevant. I was just scanning the room to see how many empty seats there were, and it was pretty packed. There were definitely some empty seats that I spotted here and there, but most of them were filled. And I think that's just because maybe this goes for other cities as well. Nashville is just an exception to the rule in every way. Every time I go to a movie theater here, you can barely even find a parking spot. That doesn't mean that movie theaters are doing well. It's just just an exception to what's going on in the rest of the country, I'm guessing. But again, like I said before, the majority of the crowd is noticeably, you know, I would say on the left side of the aisle and whatever flavor of that depends on the generation they belong to. So there were the boomer default libs and on the younger side, some, you know, millennial leftists attending. But overall, Timothy was right that these are not popular art forms anymore. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And all he was saying was a word of caution to people in his own industry, in the film industry, that he doesn't want the same thing to happen to cinema. So he mentioned he does. She doesn't mention theater. She mentions dance and she mentioned dance. And what was the other one that she mentioned? Opera. But theater, Hollywood movies are what happened to make theater obsolete or or or more of a niche piece of entertainment. A.I. will just come for Hollywood movies the way that theater the way that Hollywood came for theaters. Right. So everybody's going to end up down the pecking order eventually. You could say that's already happening. Far less people are going to see Marty Supreme than watching brain rot online. Well, it's weird that she's using that as a way to gloat over Timothy Chalamet because she is an actor as well. Yeah. Her job is if she actually believes that A.I. is going to replace Timothy Chalamet, she definitely will get replaced sooner than he will. And yet seems to be using that as a bludgeon against him. And it's worse than anything that he said. All he said, all he did was basically have tacit like hope for his industry and wanting to see it succeed. Yeah, it's just it was like a brain virus. It was Timothy Chalamet derangement syndrome. You have to like everything. Much like Sidney Sweeney, there was already some hate simmering against him for quite a while that just like reached its boiling point. And finally, they had an excuse to express it. They were already, in my opinion, sick of Timothy Chalamet's exposure by the time that he made these comments that, you know, gave them a permission slip to go after him. And it was everybody like the list is just never ending. And he was completely it. Someone responded to this and said Hollywood A-listers are going harder on Timothy Chalamet over this ballet opera ---- than they did on Harvey Weinstein. And like maybe that's a bit of an overexaggeration, but it's not that far off. It's actually wild. It's also very safe. It's safe discourse to have it. It satisfies everybody's need to be angry about something without making it about anything truly controversial, which is why I liked it at first to spin their wheels and throw in their tunes to sense about this and feel like, you know, an intellectual. But, you know, the way that she phrased it is almost like when Kelly Osbourne was on The View and she was trying to own Donald Trump and she was like, well, if you deport all the illegal immigrants, then who's going to clean your toilets? Donald Trump, in the sense that like it was just not going to go over well, no matter what. And another response to this said the Dune trailer is out. So we don't give an F anymore. It's only other actors who are still mad at him. He's he's still in the good graces of the public, if I had to guess. But she basically without realizing it, because she's kind of dull, agreed with Timothee Chalamet's original sentiment that he was expressing. I mean, it's just I'm I take umbrage with calling it reckless. It's like she's acting like if he hadn't said it, suddenly he made it true. He it's literally magical thinking like ballet was actually fine beforehand. Yeah, but if we all get into reality enough. Yeah. Yeah. If we just keep pretending that ballet and opera are relevant to the general population, it will eventually be true. Like, oh, some some dude who was going to go see Dune didn't know he wanted to go see a ballet until he watched Dune. But oh, he can't now because Timothee Chalamet said, oh, he doesn't like it or that's what he she's insinuating that he said, like somehow that he doesn't like it when that's obviously not what he said, because his mom was a ballet performer. They're acting like also people in conversation don't make sweeping generalizations and they have enough faith in the person listening to them in the audience to interpret it the way that it was intended. So like he said, nobody cares about it anymore. He didn't actually mean there are zero people in the world who care about ballet or opera. This is just that same. This is that same IQ argument that happens every time. It says, I know somebody who, you know, it's why it's kind of why, like I understand that in the world of debate, anecdotal evidence doesn't really hold up. It's not important. But if you want to connect with actual people, anecdotal evidence is pretty much how most people base their life on, which is why when you make a general sweeping allegation that says like, oh, every, you know, actors are all stuck up in whiny. Oh, actually, I'm really good friends with an actor. And they're like the most down to earth. That's the point. People exist in a world where they use anecdotal evidence to make sense of the world. It kind of, you know what else? This feels like the movie version, the elitist version of the Josh Hutcherson thing that I was seeing earlier, where he basically got like death threats for being like, I'm not a Swifty. I think it was him. Oh, yeah, that was insane. He was like, he, all he said is that he's just not a fan of her music and her fans came after him and they were accusing him of like hating Taylor Swift as a person because he's short. And they were like making fun of his height and stuff. It was wild. Like that's what this feels like. The that's the fan version of this, which is the Hollywood elitist version of this. It's the most annoying thing in the world. And I'm going to be honest, it happens to it annoys me the most because it's always people who the example of people that actually probably do get along is like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. And everybody has to be kitschy and be like, Oh, look at them. Unlikely friends. Right. Everybody has to be buddies and like everything, like every celebrity who goes to like a Taylor Swift show. Right. I don't want him to go there and be like, you know what? **** her. I don't like her music. OK. Like it's OK to not like stuff. It's fine. Yeah, I wish that people could come around to that. But my but my other point is like it's it's kind of also in the same realm as the Andy Weir stuff, which is like if you're in, if you're an insider, if you're part of the in-group, you kind of have to pretend like you like everything you can issue critique in private. That's the professional thing to do. But the second you make it public, it's now it's a faux pas. And in a way, I said for Andy Weir, I was like, look, he should he should understand that if he wants to continue to work in the industry, there are going to be expectations professionally that you don't, you know, insult somebody. Even if everybody knows that Kurtzman Star Trek is garbage, that's really not. It's not expected professionally that you state that. Timothee Chalamet is a little bit adjacent to that because he's not worrying about getting a job in ballet because he's not in ballet. But the point is, is you don't critique other professionals in in in public. You're supposed to do it in private. Well, in conclusion, I did eat breakfast this morning. I do hate waffles because I like pancakes and are still relevant. And my love of apples means that oranges should be illegal. And I cannot rotate an apple in my mind. That's I think that's what we've learned today. Thanks for watching. Listen to full episodes of Pop Culture Crisis on Spotify. Keep up with us on social media and make sure you subscribe and ring that bell so you never miss the show. Bye, guys.