Timothée Chalamet said nobody cares about ballet and opera. Misty Copeland would like a word.
The retired American Ballet Theatre principal dancer, the first Black woman ever promoted to that position in the company’s history, fired back at the Oscar-nominated actor on March 8 during a panel for Aveeno, and she did it with a detail that makes the whole controversy significantly more uncomfortable for Chalamet: she was literally used to promote his last film.
“First I have to say that it’s very interesting that he invited me to be a part of promoting Marty Supreme with respect to my art form,” Copeland said pointedly.
She was referring to a November 2025 Instagram post in which she wore a Marty Supreme-branded jacket, while a second post shared on the film’s official account showed her as a child dancing ballet with the caption “Dream Big.”
Chalamet used ballet to sell his movie. Then he said nobody cares about ballet.
“I mean, he wouldn’t be an actor and have the opportunities he has as a movie star if it weren’t for opera and ballet and their relevance in that medium,” Copeland said. “So all of these mediums have a space and we shouldn’t be comparing them.”
What Did Chalamet Actually Say?
The controversy started when Chalamet made comments during a CNN and Variety Town Hall event in which he said he did not want theatrical moviegoing to end up like ballet or opera, art forms where people want to “keep this thing alive” even though “no one cares” about it anymore.
The remarks landed badly, quickly, and broadly. The ballet and opera communities responded with fury.
The View hosts piled on, Whoopi Goldberg told Chalamet “be careful, boy… he is a boy to me.” World-renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel said the comments showed ignorance.
London’s Royal Ballet and Opera posted a response on Instagram showing its performers and craftspeople at work, 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 Seattle Opera went a different route. They started offering discounted tickets to their production of Carmen with the promo code “Timothée.”
Why Copeland’s Criticism Is Valid
Most of the backlash against Chalamet has come from the arts community responding to a celebrity dismissing their world.
That’s predictable and easy to brush off. What Copeland did is different, because she is not just a defender of ballet, she is someone Chalamet’s own team actively recruited to lend cultural credibility to his film.
The implicit argument she is making is not just that Chalamet is wrong about ballet being irrelevant.
It is that his own team understood ballet’s cultural power well enough to use it as a marketing tool, which means either Chalamet doesn’t believe what he said, or he was happy to exploit the art form he was simultaneously dismissing. Neither option reflects well on him.
Copeland was careful to keep her tone measured rather than scorched-earth.
“I think that it’s important that we acknowledge that, yes, this is an art form that’s not ‘popular’ and a part of pop culture as movies are,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have enduring relevance in culture.”
She added, “It’s often mistaken when something is popular that it’s meaningful or more impactful. There’s a reason that the opera and ballet have been around for 400 years.”
She also addressed the broader mission that has defined her career. “That’s the work that I’ve been doing my whole career, to bring more people into it.
So that people do understand the importance and the relevance of it in our communities and our culture, and you see it reflected everywhere.”
Who Is Misty Copeland?
Misty Copeland retired from American Ballet Theatre in October 2025 after a career that redefined what a ballerina could look like in America.
She became ABT’s first Black principal dancer in 2015, a milestone that made international headlines and brought a generation of new fans to the art form.
She has spent her career not just performing at the highest level but actively working to make ballet more accessible and more representative, founding the Misty Copeland Foundation to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in dance.
She is not someone who needed Timothée Chalamet to validate ballet. She is someone who spent decades doing the work to prove it didn’t need validating.
The Oscars Factor
The timing of all of this is particularly charged because both Copeland and Chalamet will be at the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15.
Copeland is set to perform as part of a presentation for the Oscar-nominated song from Sinners. Chalamet is nominated for Best Actor for Marty Supreme.
They will be in the same room. She will be there representing ballet. He will be there hoping to win an Oscar for a film whose marketing campaign featured Misty Copeland dancing ballet.
