Travis Scott Was Nervous to Read That 2,700-Year-Old Poem in The Odyssey

Travis Scott can command a stage and even make his 8-year-old daughter, Stormi, feel comfortable enough to perform in front of thousands of people. But when it came to acting in front of Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, and Robert Pattinson, Scott got some jitters when filming The Odyssey. “I was nervous as fuck,” he told Variety. “All those actors were there, and I’m standing on the table. And it wasn’t like Travis rager shit, or we’re kicking it at a function. No, this was some serious shit. There’s a camera right here in my face. Nolan’s right there. And they’re all actors — so everyone’s in their zone, locked in.” Nolan intentionally cast Scott as Phemius, a bard, as he considered rapping akin to poetry and wanted someone who could open the film with a strong presence, no matter that it was Scott’s first big movie cameo. “I threw him into the deep end, with a cast of hundreds of extras, movie stars right there,” Nolan added. “I said, ‘Okay, Travis, jump up on the table and start reciting the Song of Odysseus and hold the attention of the room.’”

Despite Scott being nervous to be the first shot of the day, Nolan knew that his reputation and performance skills would be the key link to connecting a modern audience to a 2,700-year-old poem. “I wanted somebody onscreen who would be reciting words and holding attention in the room in a very credible way, that we can relate to in today’s world, so that we would understand the drama and the emotion that comes from storytelling through poetry,” Nolan explained. “If you view it in rarefied terms, if you elevate it and have some very formal version of what a bard in the palace of Ithaca might be, I would find that alienating.” In other words: He wanted a bard who could go sicko mode.