There are casting decisions and there are casting decisions that cause Elon Musk to comment “how pathetic” on a social media post, four U.S. senators to release statements, and the director to cancel all advance screenings with influencers, and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, opening July 17, is currently generating the second kind.
Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Penelope, the faithful wife of the hero Odysseus who spends twenty years weaving a shroud and unweaving it at night to avoid remarrying in her husband’s absence. He also cast Elliot Page in an undisclosed role. The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, Zendaya as Athena, Anne Hathaway as Penelope’s suitor-adjacent character, and Charlize Theron as Calypso. The casting of Nyong’o, who is Kenyan-Mexican, as a character from ancient Ithaca in Greece has produced the response that casting a Black actress in a role from ancient Greece tends to produce in 2026, which Fox News covered under the headline “Christopher Nolan faces growing backlash over Odyssey casting, historical accuracy, screenings canceled.”
“All Christopher Nolan had to do was deliver a visually stunning take on a classic — and he’d have had a huge hit,” one X user wrote. “Instead, he decided to ruin it with questionable modifications. Some say he bowed to the woke crowd. Others say he is the woke crowd.” Another wrote: “He blackified crucial Greek characters on purpose… I won’t be paying to see it.” Musk, who has 200 million followers on his own platform, found the original post and commented: “how pathetic,” which was the whole comment, delivered with the orthographic choices of a man who considers punctuation optional in matters of cultural grievance.
Nolan, whose last film Oppenheimer earned $952 million globally and won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, canceled all advance screenings with movie influencers, which Fox News notes “he is only allowing approved critics to see in advance.” Nyong’o herself told an interviewer that if she watched the film she would turn to Homer and ask why the original lacked more female representation, which is a sentence that has not accelerated the discourse in a calming direction.
The Odyssey has been adapted into films, television series, animated features, stage productions, and other media more than 100 times since the silent film era. It opens July 17. The discourse opened considerably earlier.
When the director who made Oppenheimer cancels his influencer screenings and Elon Musk describes the casting as pathetic, what exactly is being protected?
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