Harvard professor and Greek literature expert questions how Christopher Nolan is going to tackle Matt Damon’s problematic hero in the 2026 movie, The Odyssey. Slated to arrive next summer, the Oppenheimer director’s upcoming epic action fantasy tells the tale of Odysseus’s (Damon) ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, where he fights mystical creatures and faces trials to claim the throne.
Joining Damon in the cast are Tom Holland (Telemachus), Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Elliot Page, Mia Goth, and many others.
In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Owen Danoff, Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, expressed doubts about how the upcoming film will approach Odysseus, a complicated hero. The professor argued that Odysseus is a “trickster figure” rather than a traditional hero, and one of the questionable decisions he made was killing a baby. Check out his comment below:
Even The Odyssey is aware of a very, very questionable few moments in Odysseus’ life where he actually kills a child in war. How do you like that? And what are we going to do with it? Is Matt Damon going to kill a kid?
I’ll set up the table for you. Starting in Rhapsody 6 and going on into Rhapsody 7 and Rhapsody 8, he’s washed up on the shores of this Never Never Land [where] the population are called the Phaeacians. [It’s] a nice traditional society. If you’re going to be nice to a stranger, it is because you’re showing your own moral decency, no questions asked. No questions about, “Who are you?”
Nagy further explained how the detail was a key emotional moment in Odysseus’ journey home and questioned how Nolan’s movie will approach the scene that weaves two timelines together. Read his comment below:
So, he’s this total stranger who’s washed up onshore, but the royalty is suspecting he’s an important guy. So they don’t ask who he is; they just give him a very fancy dinner. And then the idea is, “Well, quid pro quo, after I feast, they’re so nice to me that [I’ll] tell them who I am and my story.”
He tells his story, but he postpones because he’s a trickster. He’s not your normal hero, he’s a trickster figure, so he doesn’t really identify himself until a blind singer performs three songs. [For the] last of the three songs, the disguised Odysseus says, “I’ve heard you sing these beautiful things. Could you sing the song of the tale of Troy?” And, of course, he’s definitely a character in that, because he’s the inventor of the Trojan horse. He gets credit in the Odyssey for capturing Troy–fine, but technically nobody knows that he is the star, so to speak, of his version of the Trojan War.
So, the story is told–and I can reconstruct for you that because we have plot outlines of how that happened–that when Troy finally is captured, Odysseus himself takes the child of Hector and Andromache, who are the nicest people in the Iliad, and he takes the baby to the highest point in Troy and throws the baby to his death.
You and I could reconstruct that if we study all the epic traditions and whatever. So there’s a retelling of what the blind guy is saying, and point by point, it matches exactly what Odysseus actually did. So he’s the star of the story, but nobody knows that he’s in the audience and he’s listening.
But when the blind singer gets to the part where the boy is captured and X, Y, [and] Z happened, when you get to point Z where Odysseus is going to go up and commit a crime, the narrative stops and says, “While Odysseus was listening to this, he started crying. He was weeping, and weeping, and weeping, just like a captive woman when her child was killed and her husband was killed.
The camera, so to speak, moves away from this story within a story, and you see the audience experiencing the same pain that the victim of a war crime experiences. How the hell are you going to do that in a movie?
What This Means For The Odyssey
Matt Damon’s Hero Is Complicated
The Odyssey sees the director pivoting from science fiction and war movies and journeying into the fantasy genre. However, the movie’s rich source material, epic setting, and themes of homecoming and resilience align with Nolan’s past works, such as Interstellar, Inception, and Tenet.
Nagy’s comment points out the moral complexity of Odysseus and the importance of including those controversial moments in The Odyssey, while detailing how technically complicated it will be for the filmmaker to capture the emotional weight, linking the past to the present. On the other hand, Nolan is also known for non-linear storytelling that weaves the past and present timelines together.
Our Take On Matt Damon’s Role In The Odyssey
The Odyssey Will Likely Include Odysseus’ Controversial Decisions
Featuring these moments might not pose a technical issue for the director, but it’ll likely make the movie very dark for the big screen. Nolan has yet to comment on why he decided to make a big-screen adaptation of Homer’s poem of the same name, but he does have a track record of featuring morally grey protagonists who struggle with the choices they make in his movies.
Odysseus’ controversial decisions will likely play a key role in his homecoming journey in the upcoming movie, but whether the movie will go so far as to show him killing a child is unknown.
As a fan of Nolan, I do not doubt that if the filmmaker decides to include the moment, he’ll do a terrific job at maximizing its emotional weight. And honestly, what the expert described makes me even more excited about The Odyssey.
