Nolan’s Odyssey, or Homer Meets Hollywood’s Identity Politics

The 1968 miniseries L’Odissea remains the definitive adaptation of Homer's epic

It is profoundly dispiriting to watch timeless epics or famous fictional characters, let alone actual historical ones, rendered hollow by contemporary ideological caprice. The casting choices in current high-profile period adaptations, most glaringly seen in Christopher Nolan’s much-hyped The Odyssey, reflect an industry increasingly obsessed with modern optics over historical and narrative integrity. Instead of an immersive plunge into ancient Hellenic mythos, Nolan gives us a glaring exercise in virtue-signalling, slickly repackaged with IMAX bombast.

The capricious and bizarre casting choices include Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o in a Dual Role as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, singer Zendaya as Athena, Columbian-American actor John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, British-Indian Himesh Patel as Eurylochus among others.

One may counter this by saying that the ‘classic’ Hollywood era routinely saw white actors – British and American – frequently cross racial lines to play characters outside their own heritage. And yet, this comparison conflates two entirely different artistic impulses.

Laurence Olivier's brilliant, yet controversial blackface 'Othello' (1965)

When Laurence Olivier played his Oscar-nominated Othello (1965) and the Mahdi in Khartoum (1966) in blackface, or when Anthony Quinn chameleonically shape-shifted from a Greek peasant in Zorba to a Bedouin chieftain in Lawrence of Arabia or a Libyan in Lion of the Desert, these performances were rooted in the classic theatrical tradition of ‘transformative immersion’ -wherein an actor completely surrenders their modern, personal identity to submerge themselves into a character’s physical, vocal, historical and psychological reality.

Instead, Nolan’s The Odyssey is the exact opposite of transformation. It is not an attempt to submerge the actor into ancient Hellas but the force-feeding of 21st-century Western cosmopolitanism into a Bronze Age epic considered a foundational text of Western civilization.

Mediterranean Authenticity

Compare Nolan’s maddening rendition with Franco Rossi’s definitive eight-hour 1968 L’Odissea. Though produced for RAI television and spoken in Italian, Rossi’s adaptation remains unmatched precisely because it prioritized authenticity over contemporary posturing.

Rossi’s 1968 adaptation of 'The Odyssey' remains unmatched because it prioritized authenticity over contemporary posturing.

Shot across the windswept, sun-scorched Adriatic and Mediterranean, Rossi’s production derived its power from physical realism. The rocky, elemental landscapes provided a natural grounding for Odysseus’s ordeal in a world where survival demanded cunning, grit, and the favour of capricious gods.

Yugoslav actor Bekim Fehmiu, whose subsequent bid to Hollywood stardom flopped, delivers a definitive, rugged, and intensely human Odysseus - a Bronze Age warrior worn down by war and sea while the distinguished Greek actress Irene Papas radiates timeless Mediterranean dignity as Penelope.

The palaces of Ithaca and Phaeacia, the Cyclops’ cave and Circe’s Island were created with a seriousness that reflected the belief that mythology deserved historical weight.

The decision to shoot largely on location gave The Odyssey a physical authenticity. The viewer can almost feel the salt of the Aegean, the loneliness of the open sea and the isolation of islands scattered across an unknown world.

True respect for storytelling requires honouring a narrative’s organic cultural roots. When mythologies and period dramas are subjected to arbitrary diversity quotas, the audience’s suspension of disbelief collapses entirely.

‘Woke’ Casting

To expose the absurdity of ‘woke’ casting, one need only to reverse the equation. Imagine an adaptation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) starring a white or Asian lead as Okonkwo. The reaction would be entirely justified outrage.

Achebe’s masterpiece is fundamentally tethered to 19th-century Igbo culture, geography, and social hierarchy. Replacing its characters with actors of non-African heritage would erase the precise cultural friction that gives the tragedy its weight.

Vasily Livanov made for a brilliant Sherlock Holmes in the 1981 Soviet adaptation of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'

Likewise, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is a uniquely Belgian creation - a Catholic, bourgeois, former Brussels police detective uprooted by the First World War. His rigid insistence on order and continental courtliness. To cast an American or an Asian actor will strip away the specific cultural and historical displacement that defines his very method. Similarly, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is an unmistakable artifact of late-Victorian British imperial history, with its rigid class dynamics and distinct literary tradition.

This is not to say a cross-cultural adaptation cannot succeed, provided it respects the period text rather than grafting modern identity politics onto it. Consider Igor Maslennikov’s legendary Soviet adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981). Vasily Livanov’s portrayal of Holmes in was so profoundly faithful to Doyle’s ethos that Livanov was awarded an honorary MBE by the British Crown. Similarly, Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1987 Soviet film Desyat Negrityat stands as one of the few adaptations of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to retain her grim, unsparing original ending.

These versions succeeded because they did not attempt to ‘colonize’ the text with modern Soviet tropes; instead, they submerged themselves in the Victorian and Edwardian worlds.

Cultural tales belong in the settings and among the lineages that birthed them. Identity is not some interchangeable skin that one can swap between productions but the bedrock of narrative itself.

For all the critical accolades showered upon Peter Brook’s grand 1989 theatrical experiment, The Mahabharata, there is something fundamentally jarring about seeing a Japanese actor - even one as formidable as Yoshi Oida - essaying the role of Dronacharya in a production that purports to depict the ancient Vedic world.

Now, if a Japanese studio were to consciously adapt the epic by reimagining the Kurukshetra War through the austere, heightened stylistics of Noh or Kabuki, with an all-Japanese cast, that would be a legitimate act of artistic translation. I would gladly watch Toshiro Mifune or Tatsuya Nakadai bring Dronacharya or Bhishma to life within a feudal Japanese idiom. Until then, I would much rather watch Nitish Bharadwaj’s superlative Lord Krishna or Pankaj Dheer’s commanding, tragic intensity as Karna in B.R. Chopra’s popular 1988 adaptation.

The trouble with modern ‘woke’ casting is that it merely tokenizes the individual while leaving the surrounding world intact.

When Anthony Quinn had expressed a desire to play Haitian revolutionary King Henri Christophe in dark makeup, the leading lights of the Black artistic community rightfully revolted. Appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, James Earl Jones trenchantly argued that iconic Black historical figures belong to the actors who share a unique heritage that no white actor, however talented, can fully embody.

Take David Lean’s last film, the splendid A Passage to India which features his ‘lucky charm,’ Sir Alec Guinness as Professor Narayan Godbole. Despite Guinness’s immense talent, seeing a white British titan in brownface during the mid-1980s - an era when Indian actors were already establishing themselves on global screens was deeply awkward, marring otherwise perfect casting.

Far more jarring was the 2018 version of Mary, Queen of Scots – a disastrous instance of ‘woke casting’ tampering history. The 1971 film, starring British acting titans Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave (as Elizabeth and Mary Stuart respectively), along with a bevy of heavyweight actors – Patrick McGoohan, Ian Holm, Nigel Davenport, Timothy Dalton - anchored itself in the genuine visual reality of 16th-century Britain and France, allowing the raw political enmity between Mary and Elizabeth I to shine.

In contrast, the 2018 version forcibly mapped 21st-century demographic profiles onto Tudor court politics by casting Black and Asian actors, creating a visual dissonance that constantly yanks the viewer out of the period setting.

Furthermore, even within Western culture, ignoring regional and theatrical tradition produces sheer aesthetic disaster. One does not even need to cross racial lines; an American star miscast in a classic English theatrical role can utterly ruin a production. Case in point: Jason Robards Jr., indisputably one of the greatest American stage titans of the 20th century and the definitive interpreter of Eugene O’Neill, was hopelessly at sea when tackling Shakespeare. His zombie-like performance as Brutus in the 1970 film adaptation of Julius Caesar sinks the entire enterprise, proving that cultural and stylistic mismatch can flatten even the finest actors.

Unlike Nolan’s bombastic (and strangely vapid) adaptation, Franco Rossi’s 1968 Odyssey understood that Homer does not need to be made ‘modern.’ Homer is modern because human nature has not changed. The longing for home, the pain of separation, the temptation of power and the search for identity remain as recognisable today as when they were first sung around ancient fires.