Christoper Nolan's The Odyssey shares first look at Odysseus, very big helmet

Matt Damon is confirmed to play the homebound Greek hero.

By Emma Keates  |  February 17, 2025 | 12:46pm
Photo: David Fisher/Shutterstock
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Christoper Nolan's The Odyssey shares first look at Odysseus, very big helmet
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Tell me, O Muse, of Matt Damon’s role in The Odyssey. It’s official: the actor will sail the seven seas as Odysseus, the epic poem’s “man of many devices,” per Universal. In a way, the conquering hero asks the sirens how they like them apples when he finds a way to listen to their sailor-drowning song by tying himself to the mast of his ship. Damon also played a man desperate to return home by any means necessary in The Martian. Maybe he’s been training for this—or at least to wear that spiffy Corinthian helmet—his whole career.

Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

Today’s announcement ends months of light speculation about which of the many A-list actors signed on for Christopher Nolan’s epic would portray the titular hero, although most people already assumed it would be Damon. The rest of the epic’s characters—played in some arrangement by Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Himesh Patel, Bill Irwin, Samantha Morton, Jesse Garcia, Will Yun Lee, Rafi Gavron, Shiloh Fernandez, and, as of this weekend, Mia Goth and Corey Hawkins—are still much harder to pin down. (We told you there were a lot of them!) 

Nolan is set to start filming The Odyssey this spring on Sicily’s “Goat Island,” a real life location the fictional hero is thought to have visited. Per the film’s very vague logline, the Oppenheimer director will be using some sort of “brand new IMAX film technology” to bring “Homer’s foundational saga” to life. We’ll see Damon and his feathery helmet in action when the film premieres July 17, 2026.

 
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