Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
What is the release date of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey?
Who stars as Odysseus in The Odyssey?
What is the source material for The Odyssey film?
Where were some of the filming locations for The Odyssey?
What role is Zendaya playing in The Odyssey?
Is Travis Scott in The Odyssey?
Who is Sinon in The Odyssey?
Who are the “people from the sea” in The Odyssey?
News •
The Odyssey, epic action film from writer-director Christopher Nolan, released on July 17, 2026. The film is a screen adaptation of the epic poem the Odyssey, attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer. It tells the story of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, who wanders for 10 years trying to get home after the Trojan War. Odysseus eventually returns to Ithaca, and, with the help of his son, Telemachus, he destroys the insistent suitors of his faithful wife, Penelope. The eagerly anticipated film is the first that Nolan has released since the acclaimed drama Oppenheimer (2023), which won seven Academy Awards, including best actor, best director, and best picture.
Plot summary
- Release date: July 17, 2026
- Director: Christopher Nolan
- Production companies: Universal Pictures, Syncopy, Wildside
- Producers: Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas
- Writer: Christopher Nolan
- Music: Ludwig Göransson
- Running time: 172 minutes
- Budget: $250 million
While Nolan’s film preserves the broad strokes of Homer’s work, it takes numerous creative liberties with the plot and characters to condense the sprawling, episodic epic into a more cohesive story. The movie begins with alternating glimpses of the Trojan horse on a beach near Troy and Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) before starting the narrative in Ithaca. There Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is besieged by rude and insistent suitors, who are led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson). Telemachus (Tom Holland) is struggling to protect his mother and criticizes the suitors for overstaying their welcome and thereby violating “Zeus’s law,” or xenia, a Greek custom of hospitality. The palace is also populated by, among others, the loyal swineherd Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) and Melantho (Mia Goth), a deceitful attendant who betrays Penelope’s secrets and is Antinous’s lover.
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Desperate to know whether his father is still alive, Telemachus leaves Ithaca for the court of Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), king of Sparta and a veteran of the Trojan War. Menelaus, with his wife Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) at his side, regales Telemachus with stories of Odysseus’s exploits but is unable to say whether he survived or where he might be.
Meanwhile, Odysseus is on the island of Ogygia with Calypso, who wants him to stay with her and feeds him lotus flowers that cloud his memory. (The flowers were presumably inspired by the Lotus-Eaters of Homer’s poem.) He is deeply unhappy but unable to remember where he came from and whether he has a family. Calypso tells him to stop eating the flowers and encourages him to try to recall what happened to him. Odysseus begins recovering his memories of the Trojan War and narrates the harrowing journey he and his crew endured as they tried to find their way home after the fighting ended.
The film then depicts how the Trojan horse ruse fooled the Trojans and shows the Greeks enacting brutal violence inside the walls of Troy, against both soldiers and civilians. Odysseus is seen both participating in the action and appearing beset by horror and guilt over what he and his compatriots are doing. After the war ends, Odysseus sets sail with his crew and two other ships. Their first trial is a narrow escape from the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom they stumbled into while seeking food. They blind the one-eyed giant, enraging his father, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and thereafter encounter storms and ill winds on the water.
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Next, Odysseus and his crew make a landing on an unknown island and again search for provisions. In a forest they are attacked by the huge, silver-armor-clad Laestrygones. The Greeks flee back to the shore, and the giants kill many of them and destroy all the ships but Odysseus’s. His next encounter is with the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton), who turns Odysseus’s remaining crew members into pigs. After he gets her to reverse the spell, she tells him to visit the underworld and seek the advice of the seer Tiresias (James Remar) to learn how he can return home to Ithaca.
On the dark-colored sandy expanse of Hades, Odysseus meets the shades of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), the king of Mycenae, and Sinon (Elliot Page), a Greek soldier. The latter character is not actually mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad. Instead, Sinon originates in the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil, where he is presented as a clever and scheming soldier who persuades the Trojans to take the famed wooden horse inside their city gates. In Nolan’s version Sinon is an honorable man who shows the wooden horse to the Trojans, believing it to be a genuine gift in honor of Athena (Zendaya) and a peace offering. He is killed by the Trojans and thus sent to the underworld. There Sinon excoriates Odysseus for making him unwittingly deceive the Trojans, thereby violating Zeus’s law. Moreover, he says that he took Antinous’s place in the Trojan War on the condition that Antinous would pay Sinon’s family, which Antinous never did. Odysseus promises that after he returns to Ithaca he will exact revenge on Antinous and honor all the soldiers who died fighting in the war.
Meanwhile, Tiresias foretells that all of Odysseus’s men will die before they reach Ithaca. That prophecy comes true as the crew is lost, first during their ordeal navigating between Scylla and Charybdis and later after their ship is broken up in a violent storm, leaving Odysseus to wash ashore alone on Ogygia. Having told Calypso these tales and remembered who he is, Odysseus builds a raft and sets out on the sea. He eventually reaches Ithaca and finds Eumaeus.
Odysseus learns that Telemachus is abroad and in danger, so he finds and rescues his son while still concealing his identity. Upon their return to Ithaca, Telemachus deduces that the stranger is his father when the dog Argus recognizes Odysseus. Father and son, as well as Eumaeus and a few remaining loyal people, then set up a plan to defeat the suitors. In a climactic battle scene, Odysseus reveals himself to Penelope and slays all the suitors. In a significant change from the source material, Telemachus is then crowned king of Ithaca, and Odysseus and Penelope sail off into exile and travel west to pay respects to the Trojan War dead.
Cast
Nolan’s film makes some changes to the characters of Homer’s Odyssey, though they retain many of the characteristics they have in the epic poem. The descriptions in the table below reflect who the characters are in Homer’s version of the story and mention the most consequential changes that the film adaptation makes.
| actor | role |
|---|---|
| Jon Bernthal | Menelaus: king of Sparta and younger son of Atreus, king of Mycenae. The abduction or elopement of his wife, Helen, leads to the Trojan War. During the war Menelaus serves under his elder brother Agamemnon, the commander in chief of the Greek forces. |
| Matt Damon | Odysseus: king of Ithaca, son of Laertes and Anticleia, and father, by his wife, Penelope, of Telemachus. A favorite of the goddess Athena, Odysseus is both wise and wily, a man of exceptional resourcefulness, courage, and eloquence. In the film, he is shown to be guilt-ridden about his role in the brutal infiltration and destruction of Troy. |
| Anne Hathaway | Penelope: daughter of Icarius of Sparta and the nymph Periboea and wife of the hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca. They have one son, Telemachus. Remarkable for her constancy and intelligence, Penelope devises delay tactics to discourage 108 aggressive suitors during Odysseus's 20-year absence. |
| Tom Holland | Telemachus: son of Odysseus and Penelope. Telemachus visits Pylos and Sparta in search of his wandering father and later returns to Ithaca. |
| Mia Goth | Melantho: treacherous attendant in the household of Penelope who reveals Penelope's ruse to delay marrying her suitors. |
| John Leguizamo | Eumaeus: swineherd in Ithaca who remains loyal to Odysseus. He helps Telemachus and Penelope keep the suitors at bay, and he shelters and helps Odysseus upon his return home. |
| Samantha Morton | Circe: sorceress feared for her ability to cause metamorphosis. Circe is able, by means of drugs and incantations, to change humans into wolves, lions, and other animals. In Homer's Odyssey she famously changes some of the companions of the Greek hero Odysseus into swine. Her magic fails against Odysseus himself, with whom she falls in love. In the movie, she does not show romantic interest in Odysseus. |
| Lupita Nyong'o | Helen of Troy: the most beautiful woman of Greece and the wife of Menelaus. She becomes the indirect cause of the Trojan War when she elopes with (or is kidnapped by) Paris, the son of the Trojan king. Nyong'o also plays Clytemnestra, the unfaithful wife of Agamemnon, whom Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, murder. Clytemnestra is Helen's sister. |
| Elliot Page | Sinon: Greek soldier who persuades the Trojans to bring the Trojan horse inside the city walls. Sinon is not mentioned in Homer's Odyssey or Iliad. Instead, he first appeared in the Aeneid, a Latin epic poem written from about 30 to 19 bce by the Roman poet Virgil. In the film, he joins the Trojan War in place of Antinous, who makes Sinon a promise he does not keep. |
| Robert Pattinson | Antinous: the most prominent of Penelope's 108 suitors and the first to be killed by her husband, Odysseus, upon his return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Antinous is the principal mortal antagonist in Homer's Odyssey. In the film, his cowardice and self-interest is highlighted more sharply, and he is the last to be killed by Odysseus. |
| Benny Safdie | Agamemnon: king of Mycenae and the brother of Menelaus. Agamemnon is the commander of the Greek army that fights the Trojan War for the recovery of Menelaus's wife, Helen. The spirit of Agamemnon is among those whom Odysseus meets when he descends to the underworld to consult the seer Tiresias. |
| Travis Scott | A bard: entertains the suitors of Penelope with a song that includes the line “A war, a man, a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it straight into the ground!” Nolan said that he cast Scott, a rapper, to connect the idea of oral poetry with rap. |
| Charlize Theron | Calypso: a nymph of the mythical island of Ogygia. She entertains the Greek hero Odysseus for seven years, but she is unable to overcome his longing for home even by promising him immortality. In the film, she feeds Odysseus amnesic lotus flowers to suppress his memories—a plot point borrowed from a separate episode in Homer's Odyssey. |
| Zendaya | Athena: the Greek goddess of war, handicraft, and practical reason, and one of the 12 Olympians. She is the protector of the city of Athens. In Homer's Odyssey Athena frequently intervenes to help Odysseus return home and reclaim his throne. In Nolan's version, her intervention—and possibly her existence—is far more ambiguous. |
Production and marketing
Christopher Nolan could have directed a film based on Greek mythology two decades before The Odyssey. He was set to helm the Brad Pitt starrer Troy (2004) after Wolfgang Petersen left the project in the hopes of directing a Batman vs. Superman movie instead. However, when the superhero film was later canceled, Petersen, who had worked on developing Troy, wanted the reins back. Nolan offered no resistance. In place of Troy, Warner Bros. offered Nolan the director’s chair on Batman Begins (2005), which proved to be a major turning point in his career.
Universal Pictures, which also produced Oppenheimer, officially announced the title and release date of The Odyssey in December 2024. In February 2025 Universal revealed that Matt Damon was starring as Odysseus and released a photograph of the actor in costume, donning a red-plumed Corinthian helmet. Principal filming for The Odyssey took place from February to August 2025. The vast majority of the movie was shot on location in Italy, Iceland, Greece, Morocco, and Scotland, with the remainder being filmed at the Universal studio lot in Universal City, California. Other known filming locations include Al-Dakhla, in the Río de Oro region of Western Sahara; the Castle of Santa Caterina on Favignana, one of the Egadi Islands off the western coast of Sicily, Italy; and the Moray Firth inlet of the North Sea in northeastern Scotland. The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film cameras.
On July 1, 2025, a short teaser from the film was shown before screenings of Jurassic World Rebirth. Several weeks later, in an unusual move that also indicates the film’s commercial potential, the studio released tickets for The Odyssey’s debut weekend in 2026; they sold out within hours. Subsequent trailers were viewed by millions, though they were accompanied by controversy about casting, apparent anachronisms, costumes, and language. Ahead of its wider theatrical release, the film had its premiere on July 6, 2026, in London.
