The whole world has been waiting for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey with bated breath ever since the project was announced in 2024.

Nolan’s first film since Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep, The Odyssey is an epic tale of war, love and loss with a stacked all-star cast, and marks the director’s first movie shot entirely with IMAX cameras.

At last, the years-long wait for the British filmmaker’s 13th movie is almost over, with its release now less than two months away.

Excitingly, plenty about The Odyssey is still shrouded in mystery, but here is everything we do know about one of this year’s most talked-about movies…

The Odyssey is based on an epic poem by the ancient Greek writer Homer, which follows the King of Ithaca, Odysseus, on his harrowing 10-year journey home after the Trojan War.

Over the course of his voyage, Odysseus battles numerous mythical monsters, including a cyclops as well as sirens and deadly sorceresses, before finally making it back to his homeland and family.

The story predominantly explores the drive to protect one’s family, loyalty and the use of brain over brawn to succeed.

It’s no great surprise that A-listers are queuing up to work with Christopher Nolan, and the cast of The Odyssey is a real who’s who of Hollywood.

Matt Damon is taking on the lead role as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway playing his wife Penelope and Tom Holland appearing as his son Telemachus.

Robert Pattinson will play Odysseus’ rival Antinous, a suitor for Penelope, and is joined by his Dune and The Drama co-star Zendaya, who will be playing the Greek goddess Athena.

Also playing pivotal characters are Charlize Theron as the sea witch Calypso, and Lupita Nyong’o, who is also set to play both Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra.

Rapper Travis Scott also appears in the film, playing a poet figure, with Mia Goth portraying the maidservant Melantho, John Leguizamo appearing as Odysseus’ friend Eumaeus, The Bear’s Jon Bernthal playing Spartan king Menelaus and The Smashing Machine director Benny Safdie taking on the role of Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon.

Rounding out the cast are Minority Report’s Samantha Morton as the mythical Circe and Yesterday’s Himesh Patel as Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus.

Logan Marshall Green and Elliot Page are also in the film, although neither’s role has been officially revealed.

Christopher Nolan fans will know the director has a penchant for working with the same actors across different projects, and many of his The Odyssey actors have appeared in his past movies.

Anne Hathaway starred in both The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, while Matt Damon also appeared in Interstellar, as well as Oppenheimer.

Robert Pattinson and Himesh Patel both appeared in Tenet, while Elliot Page worked with the filmmaker back in 2010’s Inception and Benny Safdie had a minor role in Oppenheimer.

Compared to many of his peers, Christopher Nolan is known for his love of practical effects and shooting out in the real world, rather than relying on CGI and green-screen technology.

The Odyssey will be no different, with the cast shooting in locations as varied as Scotland, Morocco, Italy and Iceland.

“By embracing the physicality of the real world in the making of the film, you do inform the telling of the story in interesting ways,” the Dunkirk filmmaker told Empire in November last year. “Because you’re confronted on a daily basis by the world pushing back at you.”

During a recent appearance on The Late Show back in May, Christopher told Stephen Colbert that he considered The Odyssey to be the original Marvel movie.

He claimed: “Even comic book culture, whether you’re talking about Marvel or D.C. or all the rest, a lot of it comes directly from the Homeric Epics.

“The thing about Homer is, nobody knows if that was a person. Homer, in a way, is the sort of George Lucas of his time.”

When asked what made him want to adapt The Odyssey for the big screen, he admitted that a subplot involving Odysseus’ dog Argos had really stood out to him.

He explained: “I’m a new dog owner. I’d never had a dog growing up. I didn’t have a dog when my kids were young. We denied that, and then as soon as they left for college, we got a dog.

“They love the dog, too, when they get to visit. I decided to do The Odyssey because it’s the ultimate dog story.”

Lead actor Matt Damon teased to Empire back in November that The Odyssey is “exactly what you want [from] a summer movie”, describing shooting it as “the best experience of my career”.

In a more recent interview with GQ, he shared how the film felt more like the big-budget films he made in the early years of his career.

He explained: “It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away.”

Matt theorised that, because of the way that the industry is headed, The Odyssey could well be the last of its kind.

“I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this,” he claimed, adding: “I don’t think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer.”

Tom Holland also called The Odyssey his “proudest achievement” in an April interview with GQ.

“I can tell you that it is an absolute masterpiece, and I’m taking myself out of that equation. Chris Nolan’s movie is fantastic,” the Spider-Man actor said. “It’s unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before.”

Tom promised fans they are going to be “blown away by the set pieces and sequences,” thanks to the scale of Nolan’s film.

“I was absolutely blown away by the scale, the scope, his ability to navigate such an intricate and heartfelt story in the middle of this insane kind of action movie,” he enthused.

Charlize Theron also backed up Matt and Tom’s comment about the filming experience.

The Oscar winner told Elle that making the Greek epic was “one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had”, stating: “All of us had a certain personality of wanting to push harder. And when you put a group of those kinds of people together, it’s pretty amazing what they can accomplish.”

And rewarding though the experience might have been, the stars have made no secret of the fact that the shoot was an especially tough one.

Matt admitted to GQ in June: “Every time we’d go somewhere, we’d be like, ‘Well, Iceland will be easier’. And then it’s raining sideways and it’s fucking freezing. Iceland was like, ‘Yeah, easy? Hey, hold my beer’.

“I’ve never seen people look so exhausted,” Robert Pattinson added about the experience in the same GQ article. “And this was only a third of the way.”

He continued: “I started a third of the way through the movie, and they’d already been to [two] countries by that point and people just looked like… I mean, at the end of every day people were broken.”

As soon as The Odyssey’s first trailer dropped in December, sceptics wasted no time pointing out how historically incorrect they felt the armour and costumes looked.

In a Time interview from May, the director responded to his detractors, insisting that his research was thorough when putting together The Odyssey, and pointing out that our knowledge of the Bronze Age is based on “very fragmentary archaeological records”.

He said of the cynics: “Hopefully they’ll enjoy the film, even if they don’t agree with everything. We had a lot of scientists complain about Interstellar. But you just don’t want people to think that you took it on frivolously.”

There was also some discourse during filming, when the director’s location choices were met with backlash.

Matt Damon and Zendaya were reported to be filming a sequence in Dakhla, a city in the Western Sahara that has been under Moroccan occupation for the last 50 years.

María Carrión, the executive director of Western Sahara International Film Festival, accused the director, his actors and his crew – whether knowingly or unknowingly – of “contributing to Morocco’s repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime’s efforts to normalise its occupation of Western Sahara” by filming in the region.

While the filmmaker has not directly responded to these comments, The Guardian has claimed that The Odyssey’s shoot in Dakhla was completed in around four days, and was already over by the time the festival organisers raised their concerns.

Although some were concerned with the costume and location choices of The Odyssey, there’s also been a separate backlash centred on its casting.

Some online commentators have questioned why a movie based on Homer’s Greek epic appears to have no Greek actors confirmed in the principal cast.

Greek City Times even published an open letter which argues that Greek people are being ignored in a story so deeply rooted in Greek culture, history and identity.

Similarly, the decision for all of the characters to speak in American accents was one that raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile, certain right-wing parts of the internet regrettably exploded when it was revealed that Lupita Nyong’o would playing Helen of Troy, described in mythology as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.

One such critic was Elon Musk, who has spent the last few months complaining on social media about Lupita’s inclusion.

“Casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!” the X owner claimed, referring to the South African king, while also Elon branding Nolan “an anti-White racist”.

Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh claimed in another X post that “not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” despite the star being named People’s Most Beautiful Woman after first rising to fame.

Lupita has since addressed the racist backlash, reminding those who have an issue with her casting that The Odyssey is a “mythological story”.

“Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defence,” she told Elle in May 2026. “The criticism will exist whether I engage with it or not.”

She added: “It spans worlds. So that’s why the cast is what it is. We’re occupying the epic narrative of our time.”

Nolan praised the Oscar-winning actor during the same article, enthusing: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless.

“I’m sure there’s a tremendous amount of discipline and training that goes into projecting that kind of poise and feeling the emotion bubbling beneath the character, the layers of the character right there underneath.”

While Christopher Nolan’s take isn’t the first adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, it looks to be the biggest and most epic adaptation to date.

Kirk Douglas previously starred in an Italian version of the story in 1954 called Ulysses, while the Coen brothers’ 2000 musical-comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? turned Odysseus into an escaped prisoner in the American South.

The most recent adaptation of The Odyssey came in 2024, with the film The Return.

Starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, the movie covered only the last act of the story, depicting Odysseus pretending to be a suitor to win his wife back – and killing the men trying to pursue her.

Mark your calendars – Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey will hit theatres on July 17 2026.

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