Elliot Page, Himesh Patel and more join Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey
You need an epic cast to retell a greek epic, apparently
Late last year we heard Tom Holland, Matt Damon and Zendaya would be leads in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and now the cast list is starting to fill out some more.
Other big names that have joined the production include Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Bill Irwin and Samantha Morton.
Some of these are not Nolan first-timers either. Page played Ariadne in Inception, while Patel played Mahir in Tenet.
A Greek epic needs a lot of players, but it already feels like we have more than a film’s worth confirmed for Nolan’s The Odyssey. Last week we heard Benny Safdie and John Leguizamo are part of the cast, while we already knew Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron and Robert Pattinson were on-board.
It’s not so much the roll call of a film as a summer season's worth of A-list movie stars.
The Odyssey is expected to be Nolan’s most expensive film to date (not accounting for inflation) with early estimates pegging the production budget at $250 million.
There have been numerous film adaptations of The Odyssey to date, some of which you might not assume would owe so much to Homer’s epic poem. These include Cold Mountain, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie. A more recent take was Ralph Fiennes 'The Return' form 2024.
Christopher Nolan’s take is expected to be a more straight adaptation than most of these, described by studio Universal as “a mythic action epic shot across the world.” We’ve also heard it will be partly shot in Sicily, alongside Morocco and the UK.
The Odyssey is the tale of Odysseus’s 10-year voyage home after the Trojan war, which is the subject of The Iliad.
Matt Damon is expected to play Odysseus, while Tom Holland is predicted to play his son Telemachus.
Nolan’s The Odyssey is due in cinemas on July 17, 2026, and shooting began in January 2025.