Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is shaping up to be the biggest movie of the year, and right-wing voices are furious at it.
“Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey,” wrote Elon Musk on X. Musk, alongside hundreds of right-wing culture warriors algorithmically boosted on his platform, have spent the past few weeks fuming over the news that Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy, and that transgender actor Elliot Page might be playing Achilles.
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One right-wing influencer described the casting of Page as Achilles as “the final straw to ruin Homer.” Another pundit, in a post that received over 130,000 likes, asked how a “scrawny little female” could possibly play a character famed for his battle prowess. When looking at the countless viral social media posts lambasting the idea of Page as Achilles, one would never guess that Achilles is a fictional character, not a historical figure, and he only shows up in The Odyssey for one brief scene.
You’d also never guess from the outrage that Page hasn’t even been confirmed to play Achilles. Nolan and Universal Studios have stayed quiet about Page’s role, so all fans have to work with are a few seconds from the second official trailer for the film. The trailer shows Page’s character, covered in mud, telling Odysseus, “Who’s looking after your wife and son?”
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The dark setting of the scene resembles descriptions of Hades’ underworld, so Page likely plays Elpenor, the youngest member of Odysseus’ crew. Elpenor falls off his boat, drowns, then returns to talk to Odysseus as a dead man. Odds are that Page’s role will be minor, his character won’t have any fight scenes, and he will not be playing the famous warrior Achilles. So why did people like Musk jump to that conclusion, and why did the idea of Page as Achilles spark so much anger?
A lot of the defensiveness comes down to how Achilles, to the chagrin of homophobes everywhere, has often been interpreted as queer. Achilles’ relationship with his male friend Patroclus is presented in The Iliad as so intense that readers have often wondered if this was more than a nonsexual friendship. Bibliotheca, written around the 1st century AD, explicitly interpreted their relationship as queer, as did Plato’s Symposium, written around 400 years earlier. Most recently, Greek scholar Madeline Miller ran with the idea in her 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, interpreting Achilles’ and Patroclus’ dynamic as explicitly (and passionately) romantic.
The idea of a gay or bisexual Achilles is often dismissed as liberal revisionism, a case of modern “woke” writers forcing their agenda onto the text. But as Miller herself put it, it’s the version of Achilles as a stoic Brad Pitt-looking straight guy that’s the newer interpretation: “I’d read Plato’s Symposium,” Miller explained in a 2021 piece for The Guardian, “where Achilles and Patroclus are not just presented as lovers, but the ideal romantic relationship. I knew that interpreting their relationship as romantic was a very old idea, and I was angry at the way homophobia was erasing this reading.”
Miller was frustrated that so much of the modern perception of Achilles is shaped not by ancient Greek culture as it was but by later interpretations of Homer’s poems that reflected evolving Western cultural values. One historian noted that, throughout the world wars of the 20th century, propagandistic depictions of Achilles and Patroclus tended to play up their bond as soldiers, not lovers: “[Achilles’] care for Patroclus revealed his strong loyalty to his comrades; something seen as a desirable characteristic in an ethical soldier.” This helped pave the way for the mainstream perception that the two were not in love, but just emotionally open in a manner that straight men aren’t today. Shortly before Song of Achilles was published, anthropologist Robin Fox had claimed there was “certainly no evidence in the text of the Iliad that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers,” dismissing the issue as “contemporary critics who see all literary instances of male affectation for males as proof of ‘repressed homosexuality.’”
The depiction of Brad Pitt’s Achilles in the 2004 film Troy, which further plays up the soldier camaraderie angle, is similarly a reflection of American ideals around masculinity than a reflection of Ancient Greece’s. Right-wingers today are happy to embrace Troy’s depiction of Achilles not because it’s accurate, but because it’s flattering to their own worldview. A version of the Iliad that changes Patroclus and Achilles’ relationship to cousins is, to right-wingers, a more respectful take on The Iliad than Madeline’s thoroughly researched Song of Achilles.
It doesn’t matter that Achilles has been described in classical texts as both queer and androgynous in appearance, to the point where he can successfully disguise himself as a woman in the Achilleid; the right has grown obsessed with a version of Achilles that is stoic, straight, undeniably masculine, and the unimpeachable hero of the Trojan War. The actual Achilles of The Iliad — a flawed, overly-emotional anti-hero whose actions are supposed to be judged critically by the audience — is not the version right-wing culture warriors care about.
The right-wing protectiveness over a fairly recent version of Achilles is reminiscent of the right’s obsession with old-fashioned America as filtered through Hays Code-era Hollywood. Mid-20th-century American culture was not as straight and chaste as the heavily restricted movies from its era implied, but right-wing culture warriors benefit from the narrative that it was. The ancient Greeks did not share the modern American conservative’s hangups around sexuality and race, but it’s important for figures like Musk to pretend otherwise. Homophobes often push the narrative that queerness is some new phenomenon inflicted on modern society, rather than something that’s been around since before Homer’s time. It’s easier to justify their prejudice if they believe their prejudice has been shared by every other culture before them.
Heightening the right’s anger against Nolan is their misguided sense of being betrayed by one of their own. Nolan’s movies have often been praised by the right for their supposedly conservative themes and their near-total absence of LGBTQ+ characters. It’s easy to see how right-wingers would latch onto Interstellar, for instance, a movie where a rural farmer saves humanity by embracing a pioneer mindset that modern America left behind. It’s easy to see how someone like Musk would look at Nolan’s movies, most of which center around brilliant straight men with women in their periphery, and take for granted that Nolan thinks like they do.
Although Nolan’s filmography can lend itself well to a right-wing reading, it’s become clear that Nolan himself is not right-wing. At the very least, he is not the sort of reactionary, prejudiced conservative that the raging culture warriors want him to be. Nolan doesn’t seem to think it’s abnormal to present a Black woman as uniquely beautiful, nor does he think it’s weird to cast a trans man in a male role. The reactionaries on X want both these things to be seen as unnatural, and now one of the biggest directors of our time is casually contradicting their worldview.
Elliot Page first worked with Nolan on his 2010 blockbuster Inception, 10 years before Page came out as a trans man. Page has mentioned in interviews that his acting career often felt like a painful compromise between success and his gender identity; he hated wearing feminine clothing for instance, but the job would so often require it of him. The Odyssey marks Page’s first time in a Nolan film as a male character, allowing him to keep thriving as a mainstream actor without the gender dysphoria that used to come with it.
“To come back now, as you can imagine, being more just comfortable in yourself makes these sorts of projects more enjoyable,” Page said in an October interview. “To get to have a Chris Nolan experience again now — that actually, really just meant so much to me.”
Transphobes have spent years insisting that Page transitioning would end his acting career, but Nolan’s proven it hasn’t. Every new version of The Odyssey is a reflection, intentionally or otherwise, on the cultural values of the time it’s written in; by casting Page and Nyong’o in his adaptation, Nolan reaffirmed the idea of diversity as something our culture holds dear. Nolan likely didn’t cast Elliot Page for any culture war reasons, but for transphobes, this just makes his casual dismissal of their worldview sting even more. Without even appearing to try, Nolan’s told known transphobes like Musk that they, not people like Page, are the ones out of step with modern Western values.
Michael Boyle is a freelance critic and journalist who covers politics, pop culture, and everything in between. You can find him in pubs like Slate, The Daily Beast, and SlashFilm.
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