Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ actress said she’d scold Homer over lack of female speaking roles

Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o said in an interview on Thursday that if she met the ancient Greek playwright Homer, she would grill him about the lack of female representation in his epics.

Nyong’o, famous for her roles in “Black Panther” and “12 Years a Slave,” will play Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient epic, “The Odyssey.” Helen of Troy is known in mythology as the world’s most beautiful woman and for whom the Trojan War was started in Homer’s epic, “The Iliad,” followed by “The Odyssey.” Nyong’o will also be playing Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, in the same movie.

Emmy-winning interviewer Jake Hamilton of “Jake’s Takes” interviewed the cast of Nolan’s upcoming “The Odyssey” adaptation on Thursday, asking many of them the same general question.

“I want you to imagine, really quick, that you’re sitting in a movie theater, and you’re sitting next to Homer,” he began. “Let’s say he speaks English. Let’s say he understands what movies are, and you watch ‘The Odyssey.’ When it’s over, you can lean over and go, ‘Okay, cool. What do you think about how I did this?’ What is an aspect of your performance that you’d love to get his thoughts on?”

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“I would be like, ‘So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?’” Nyong’o said. “Okay?”

“And then do you lean forward and look at him like that?” Hamilton said as he pretended to lean forward and give a challenging look to the next seat.

“Yes. Like, ‘Hmm? Remember us??’” Nyong’o replied.

The film has already faced waves of controversy for multiple aspects that have fans of Homer’s work feeling uneasy about the film.

In May, he confirmed having cast Nyong’o as Helen, which sparked controversy as yet another example of casting famous fictional or historical figures with actors of another racial background, similar to Disney’s live-action remakes of “Snow White” or “The Little Mermaid” or Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra” which faced backlash from the Egyptian government.

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Nolan also revealed to Time Magazine that rapper Travis Scott will be playing a Greek bard. Nolan defended the choice as an acknowledgment of poetic tradition.

“I cast him because I wanted to nod toward the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” Nolan told Time.

In the footage released so far, characters in Nolan’s adaptation can be seen using modernized American English terms like “Let’s go” and “Daddy.” A recent promotion for the film featured NBA player LeBron James and his son, as parallels to Odysseus and his son Telemachus, where LeBron is dribbling a basketball and narrating over imagery from the film.

A Hollywood Reporter writer was taken aback by the American accents used in the trailer, writing, “Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.”

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