I Fear We May Have Given Timothée Chalamet Too Much Attention

If he wasn’t famous, he’d just be your friend’s pretentious Letterboxd boyfriend.

The internet loves to build a celebrity up. It also loves, eventually, to be like: okay great, that’s enough of him. Enter: Timothée Chalamet.

For the past few months, Timmy’s charming, confident self has been everywhere — and I mean everywhere. His orange-hued, spectacle-driven campaign for Marty Supreme has included climbing the Las Vegas Sphere, describing his own work as “top level,” and repeatedly referring to Kylie Jenner as his “partner,” which low-key makes him sound like an investor in Kylie Cosmetics. (Oh, you know Kris Jenner pitched a “Marty Supreme Orange” lip kit.)

And at first, this felt fun. A new Timothée! A slightly weirder Timothée! A goatee’d Timothée! A Timothée who might occasionally do something chaotic in public! But after months of it, the vibe has shifted from intriguing to OK, that’s enough Timmy for one awards season.

Then came the University of Texas interview about the future of cinema. Timothée said he didn’t want to be working in ballet or opera, “things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’” He quickly added, “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there,” but once the clip hit the internet it was greeted by roughly 12,000 furious quote tweets. (He’s been called out by Whoopi Goldberg and defended by Karla Sofía Gascón, which is basically the kiss of death.)

So, yah, some people are genuinely mad about what sounded like him casually dismissing opera and ballet, two artforms with famously intense fan bases. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, the severity of the reaction feels less about a global surge of opera defenders, and more about a collective itch to humble Timothée Chalamet just a little bit.

Let’s face it: There is something so deeply and specifically annoying about a person [reader: a man] who thinks he’s more high-brow than he actually is. (Especially when his name is neatly piped onto the annual Kardashian-Jenner gingerbread house.) And to be clear: Timothée is an excellent actor and Marty Supreme is a beautiful film. Those things are not really up for debate. But this version of him who has emerged during this press cycle (the philosophizing, Sphere-climbing version), is also a little different from the fragile indie prince we collectively adopted during the Call Me By Your Name years. I hate to say it, but I kind of miss the Timmy who wore a sparkly harness to the Golden Globes and seemed thrilled to be there. His current public persona is infused with his role in Marty Supreme, where he plays a single-minded and brilliant ego-maniac in pursuit of greatness, but I keep secretly hoping he’ll rediscover the more humble, less serious twink who crashed his own lookalike competition.

To be clear, none of this means his career is in danger. If anything, this kind of micro-backlash is practically a rite of passage. If Timmy really does want to be “one of the greats,” then people caring this much about what he has to say, as if he has the power to end centuries-old artforms with a flippant comment, is a sign he’s on the way there. What it does suggest, however, is that in pursuit of that gold statuette, the people managing his campaign may have allowed him to become just a little bit overexposed. Now that Oscar season is inexplicably a million years long, it seems like his detractors are simply over seeing him everywhere. And they’re willing to cosplay as lifelong opera stans to remind Team Chalamet that it’s the fans who decide who gets to become a G.O.A.T (or pull off a goatee.)