Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Trailer Has One Major Issue (And It's Really Bugging Us)
by Witney Seibold · /FilmA full-length trailer for Christopher Nolan's big-budget film adaptation of "The Odyssey" has dropped, giving folks a good, healthy earful of the movie's actual dialogue. In what feels like a strange choice, though, Nolan has decided to give the film's characters American accents. To be fair, many members of the cast are from the U.S.: Matt Damon (Odysseus), Anne Hathaway (Penelope), Zendaya (Athena), and so on. Meanwhile, Charlize Theron (Calypso) was born in South Africa, but she's been working in the U.S. for decades now. Who could forget her star-making turn in "Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest?"
Most curiously, though, Nolan has asked his British cast members to affect American accents as well. The London-born Tom Holland is playing Telemachus, and he speaks with a nonspecific American dialect. Elsewhere, Robert Pattinson, also born in London, co-stars as Antinous, one of Penelope's many suitors, and he, too, seems to hail from Southern California. At one point in the latest trailer, Antinous leans in close to Telemachus and whispers, "You're pining for a daddy you didn't even know." A daddy? Not a "father" or a "patriarch," but a daddy. It's a colloquialism that feels weirdly out of place.
Later still in the trailer, Odysseus, leading an army of soldiers, yells openly, "Let's go!" like he's heading an American Little League team. Not to belittle my own voice, but American accents often lack the necessary gravitas to communicate the grandeur of ancient Greek poetry. It's especially egregious when people are saying "daddy" and yelling "let's go." The American voice lends, forgive me, an amateurish quality to Homer's ancient epic. I haven't seen Nolan's film yet, but the new trailer is giving me some doubts.
The Odyssey sounds weird in American English
It's worth noting that early versions of English only came into being in about 450 CE, while Homer's "Odyssey" dates back to the 8th century BCE. The poem is older than the language of Matt Damon.
But then, Christopher Nolan had to make a creative decision, didn't he? He could have taught his actors to speak in the exact dialect of ancient Greece and then presented his movie with subtitles, but that would likely have made his nine-figure epic all the more expensive. Alternatively, he could have hired Greek actors to speak the film's dialogue in modern Greek, but that, too, would have been an anachronism, as ancient Greek is different from the version spoken today. Not to mention, most Greek actors don't command the same kind of blockbuster attention as Hollywood stars like Damon and Anne Hathaway.
Even if Nolan had allowed his actors to speak in their own voices, that might've been distracting as well, highlighting the American-ness of some characters and the British-ness of others. So, instead, he elected to make everyone sound American, which is fine. Every version of "The Odyssey" that exists today is a translation, anyway.
What rubs me the wrong way is the casual colloquialisms in Nolan's script. The "pining for a daddy" line doesn't bear the ring of ancient poetry. It sounds like, well, a slang term written in the 2020s. Ditto for Damon yelling "Let's go!" That's an action movie line, not an entreaty of Odysseus, spurring his men to battle.
It's fine that the characters speak English, but did Nolan also have to make their dialogue sound so casual and accessible to the modern ear? It would have been more appropriate if the language did sound a little poetic, highfalutin, or otherwise dusty.
The American-ness of The Odyssey is distracting so far
But then, this issue with the language in "The Odyssey" is a very old problem that cinema has never quite been able to solve. One can likely list dozens of movies off the tops of their heads in which Ancient Roman characters speak with British accents. British actors like Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov similarly played Roman characters in movies like "Spartacus" and "Quo Vadis," and, for many folks, the British accent might as well be the accent of Ancient Rome. Never mind that the people these actors are playing would have been, in the real world, speaking Latin.
American and Italian actors do this, too. Charlton Heston portrayed Ben-Hur and Moses, for instance. Italian peplum movies were likewise in Italian, yet they featured American stars like Steve Reeves in Herculean roles and were dubbed in English for U.S. television. The actors for these dubs would even retain their British or American accents. (I recall watching many of them that way as a kid.) At least Italian would've been more geographically accurate to Ancient Greece. Still, for "The Odyssey," the American-ness of everything is making its story feel less classical and too contemporary. It bugs me.
(This is why the Muppets should have merely adapted "The Odyssey" instead.)
Of course, we haven't seen "The Odyssey" yet, and the movie's modern American voices might be employed to bring some sort of modern American thesis to its source material. Perhaps the choice of colloquial language is being done for some sort of thematic effect we're not yet aware of. But it's a distraction in the trailer — one that evokes McDonald's and SoCal surfers more than the beaches of ancient Ithaca.
"The Odyssey" opens in theaters on July 17, 2026.