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The Oscars are fast approaching and one category in particular has two very famous faces jostling for the same award. Timothée Chalamet and Leonardo DiCaprio are both in with a chance of winning one of the night’s most anticipated awards: Best Actor.
Timothée, for his mercurial performance in Marty Supreme, and Leonardo for his role in One Battle After Another.
However, a couple of years ago, Timothée revealed the few pointers the esteemed Titanic actor gave him as his stardom was ascending fast in Hollywood.
What did Leonardo DiCaprio tell Timothée Chalamet?
The Marty Supreme actor once cited his role models as Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Michael B. Jordan, the latter two of whom he’s up against at the 2026 Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
“One of my heroes—I can’t say who or he’d kick my ass—he put his arm around me the first night we met and gave me some advice,” he told Time Magazine in 2021. It was then revealed in a 2022 Vogue article that it was Leonardo who gave him the wise words.
“No hard drugs,” Timothée recounted, “and no superhero movies.”
It’s been a long road since Timothée and Leo first crossed paths in 2018 and later shared the screen in Don’t Look Up. Now, the pupil is officially playing for the same trophy as the master – and you can bet the red carpet at this year’s Oscars will be a little extra tense.
Timothee’s ballet and opera controversy
It appears Leo didn’t warn him on the fall out effects of dissing some of the entertainment industry’s oldest art forms.
During a recent interview with Matthew McConaughey to promote his Oscar-nominated film Marty Supreme, he made the comment that “nobody cares” about ballet and opera.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’” Chalamet said on the interview hosted by CNN and Variety.
Realising his error, he added, “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there,” and admitted, while giggling, that he “took shots for no reason.”
Celebrities calling out Timothee Chalamet
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis recently called his comments during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “His comments are silly, and I’m sorry that they’re going to be a bit of his legacy now,” she said. “I’m sure he regrets the comment because you can’t throw those art forms under a bus. You can’t do it. They’re too important.”
Doja Cat was also quick to blast the actor in a social media video. “Opera is 400 years old. Ballet is 500 years old,” she said in a TikTok video which has since been deleted. “Somebody named Tim-oh-tay Cha-lam-et had the nerve to say — on camera — that nobody cares about it,” she said.
“I’m sure you can walk into an opera theatre right now, seats will be filled out, and nobody’s saying a word as the performance is going because everybody has that much respect for it.”
Whoopi Goldberg also chimed in on her talk show The View. “When you crap on somebody else’s art form, it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to see,” she said. “So be careful. I’m just saying. Be careful, boy.”
Grammy-nominated artist Charlie Puth voiced his take on the whole drama, saying:
“I feel compelled to say that even when an art form isn’t at the height of its popularity, traces of it still live on in the music and cinema that resonate with people today,” Puth wrote online.
“The popular music we hear now simply wouldn’t exist without the popular music that came before it centuries ago.”
