Explained: Controversies About Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

In Homer’s Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus must overcome tempests, temptations, mythical monsters, and divine wrath to sail home to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey, which retells the epic on IMAX film, has had to similarly weather a storm of controversy as it makes its way to theaters.

Ever since the movie was announced in 2024, much ink has been spilled debating its casting choices and source material. Far from quelling the tide of discontent, two subsequent trailers have seemingly given even more ammunition to critics, whose Poseidon-like fury has been unleashed on perceived anachronisms and the use of evidently modern language. Encyclopædia Britannica walks you through the film’s supposed transgressions that have elicited hand-wringing—even from the likes of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person. With the favor of the Muses, we’ll also touch on why people keep bringing up Vikings and Batman in these heated arguments.

Casting: Lupita Nyong’o, Elliot Page, and Travis Scott Under Fire

Easily the biggest bone of contention in the lead-up to the film has been its casting. The absence of any Greek actors in the principal cast of The Odyssey has rankled many who had hoped for prominent Greek representation in a foundational work of Greek literature. Michael Vlamis, who was cast in a brief supporting role, is the only confirmed actor of Greek descent in the film. Hollywood films based on Greek mythology have had a poor track record in this regard: Greek representation in leading roles in films such as Ulysses (1954), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Troy (2004), Clash of the Titans (1981 and remake in 2010), Immortals (2011), Hercules (2014), and The Return (2024) has been limited and sometimes absent.

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Some sections of the audience have taken exception not to the lack of Greek representation in the cast but with what they view as an unwarranted emphasis on inclusion. Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, confirmed to be playing a dual role as both Helen of Troy and her half sister Clytemnestra, has received perhaps the most clamorous backlash. As a Kenyan-Mexican woman, Nyong’o’s casting challenges Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Helen as a white, golden-haired woman. Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh strongly criticized the casting choice, bluntly saying that he did not believe she was “the most beautiful woman in the world”—a popular description attached to Helen. Musk, the executive chairman of X (formerly Twitter), agreed with the criticism and claimed the move was made solely to satisfy the Academy Awards’ diversity criteria, drawing accusations of racism.

The casting decision also ignited fierce online discussions about the adjectives used to describe Helen in the works of Homer and other ancient Greek poets, the likely physical appearance of Greeks in the Bronze Age, idealized beauty standards, and the broader difficulty of superimposing modern ideas of race and identity on ancient Greece. For her part, Nyong’o held firm: “This is a mythological story,” she said in an interview with Elle magazine, implying that the age-old story and the character were open to reinterpretation. She said she preferred not to spend time defending her casting, stressing that the cast was “representative of the world.”

Notably, Black actresses have played the role of Helen before, though not on film. Eartha Kitt played her in Orson Welles’s 1950 stage production Time Runs (a take on the legend of Faust), and Galyn Görg made a guest appearance as the character in the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001).

The inclusion of Elliot Page, who came out as a transgender man in 2020, in the cast also stirred controversy. His role in the film turned out to be Sinon, a Greek soldier who facilitates the Trojan horse ruse, but for months speculation flew that he would play Achilles, the legendary hero of the Iliad. This was enough to provoke a tirade from Newsmax anchor Rob Finnerty, in which he lambasted the possibility of Page playing the “greatest warrior in history,” blurring the lines between mythology and historical fact. The criticism was echoed by other right-wing commentators and on social media, once again endorsed by Musk. Page is not the first transgender person to play a character from Greek mythology onscreen: In the television series Kaos (2024), Misia Butler, who came out as transgender as a teenager, played Caeneus, a character who in Greek mythology was born a girl and later transformed into a man by the god Poseidon.

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Separately, many were confounded by Nolan’s choice to cast rapper Travis Scott—with only a couple of acting credits to his name—as a bard in The Odyssey. Nolan has since explained the choice in an interview with Time magazine, saying it was a “nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.”

Other Controversies: Translations, accents, boats, and helmets

Although Nolan has not singled out any particular translation of the Odyssey as the foundation of his adaptation, his brief citation of British-American classicist Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation in an interview with Empire magazine perturbed at least some who assumed it would inform much of the film. On social media and online forums, Wilson—the first woman scholar to do a complete translation of the work in English—was accused of introducing a feminist slant to the original text, with some implying her translation was revisionist and agenda-driven. A substantial part of the opprobrium centered on Wilson’s choice of words when representing women, which ran counter to other translations. Wilson has explained these choices as an effort to stay closer to the original text by replacing bias-ridden gendered language, which she argues was introduced without justification in previous translations. Wilson explained her approach to translating female characters in a 2017 New Yorker essay: “I read Homer’s great poem as a complex and truthful articulation of gender dynamics that continue to haunt us,” she writes.

Listen to Wilson read the opening to her translation of the Odyssey and elaborate on the difficulties of translation:

Wilson’s translation is also known for its stripped-down, accessible English that eschews the ornateness of several other translations, though this too has drawn reproach. The second trailer of The Odyssey seemed to suggest the film would take a similar approach. The use of the word “dad” by Tom Holland’s Telemachus seemed jarring to many because of how anachronistic and casual it sounds to a modern audience. Leaving aside the fact that there is nothing period-accurate about ancient Greeks speaking English in the first place, Wilson notes that the Greek language does have less formal words for “father,” which possibly gives Nolan some creative leeway to use variations of the word in the film. Nolan sees the use of modern-sounding dialogue as a risk worth taking, with the aim of presenting language that has “emotional, not intellectual, meaning to people,” as he told the Los Angeles Times.

Another aspect of the trailer that some viewers found distracting was the actors’ use of American accents. Audience expectations probably boil down to the Hollywood convention of actors using British accents for films set in ancient times in foreign regions. The practice likely had its roots in mid-20th century productions and crystallized over the decades, though American accents have often been used in film history to differentiate the oppressed from the oppressor. Films such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960), for example, give Romans British accents and enslaved people American accents.

Dissatisfaction with historical accuracy did not end there. Some audiences found it odd that the trailer featured a Viking longship, which would not have existed until about a couple of millennia after the events of the Odyssey, which was written c. 725–675 bce based on oral traditions of the Mycenaean Greeks during the Late Bronze Age. The ship is a modern Norwegian vessel called Draken Harald Hårfagre built to resemble a medieval Viking galley. Nolan, known for his preference for practical effects over computer-generated enhancements, has not addressed the anachronism directly but said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the Draken was “wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology,” and gave the actors and crew the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the workings of a real ship.

Viewers have similarly found fault with the helmets shown in the trailers. Though Odysseus’s famous boar’s tusk helmet from the Iliad is unlikely to make it to the screen any time soon, audiences were especially unimpressed by the helmet worn by Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon. Its matte black, carbon fiber-like appearance drew comparisons to Batman’s cowl in Nolan’s Dark Knight film trilogy. Nolan, however, has said that the armor could conceivably have been made of blackened bronze, which may have been forged during that period by adding gold, silver, and sulfur to bronze (see also What Armor Did the Heroes of the Odyssey and the Iliad Wear?).

Perhaps only the scales of Zeus could predict whether Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey will overcome the many-headed Scylla of controversy that surrounds it. The greater challenge for a film of its scale is capturing the spirit of Homer’s immortal epic, which has proven, over centuries, as mutable as the shape-shifting Proteus—and just as slippery.