Elliot Page Isn't Playing Achilles! Who (other than Curmie) could have guessed?

You may perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie had a good time a couple months ago, laughing at the conservative hand-wringers who convinced themselves that Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page was going to play Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic version of “The Odyssey.” 

There were rumors, you see, and that was sufficient evidence for idiots like Rob Finnerty of Newsmax and the terminally self-important and generally wrong Elon Musk to decry the casting of, in Finnerty’s words, “a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds” as “the greatest warrior in history.”  Even Finnerty acknowledges that Page would “reportedly” play Achilles, but the rest of his screed works on the assumption that the rumors should indeed be believed.  The once savvy Jack Marshall launched into a diatribe against “wokeness” and “stunt casting,” writing that Page “was cast” as Achilles.  No room for skepticism when there is righteous dudgeon just waiting to be spewed!

Guess what?  Page isn’t playing Achilles!  There is indeed some question as to whether Achilles even appears, either as a ghost or in a flashback.  The preview showing of the film happened a couple of nights ago, and Curmie can’t find any commentary he’d regard as trustworthy that says anything one way or the other.  Someone on Reddit says Achilles isn’t in the film, but Curmie isn’t betting the mortgage on that assurance.

Curmie confesses that it has been a very long time since he last read Homer, but does think it would be a little strange not to have Achilles appear, either as a shade in the underworld or in a flashback scene, especially since the role Page actually is playing, Sinon, doesn’t appear anywhere in Homer at all.  The character is best known to us through Vergil’s Aeneid.  He was the Greek soldier, a cousin of Odysseus, who allows himself to be captured by the Trojans, pretends to be a deserter, and convinces them to bring the Trojan Horse inside the city gates. 

Page’s Sinon isn’t going to over-power the Trojans, but that’s not his job.  He outwits them instead, and Page’s charisma and facility with language would seem to be appropriate qualifications for the role.  It’s also worth pointing out that Greek men in that period didn’t really have a lot of choice about whether they’d go to war.  You couldn’t opt out because you were small.  Moreover, Page’s diminutive size could actually be used to advantage for this particular role, making the subterfuge that Sinon had been forsaken or sacrificed by the Greek army more plausible.  Of course, we don’t know what the real Sinon looked like because... he never existed except as a fictive character.  That’s a 5th century CE image of him at the top of the page: over a millennium after he supposedly existed, in other words.  But he does look a little pudgy compared to Elliot Page...

Curmie is just spit-balling here, but there are, or at the very least could be, good and appropriate reasons to cast Elliot Page.  Plus, of course, there’s the likelihood that Nolan and Page just like working with each other.  There’s plenty of hot air about how Nolan cast Page to have a better chance at an Oscar.  That’s true to the extent that Page is a good actor, thereby making the film better, but the movie had already met those dumb “inclusion” requirements through other means, and Sinon is unlikely to be a big enough role to qualify as “significant,” anyway.

Curmie does note that he was led to believe that Page would probably take on the role of Elpenor (who at least appears in Homer’s epic!).  This rumor, too, was regarded as definitive by a lot of folks as recently as last week.  Curmie does point out, however, that he italicized the words “reported” and “expected” in his post back in May, suggesting that whereas the Elpenor rumor, unlike the Achilles rumor, was at least plausible, he wasn’t going to suggest that such casting was indeed a fact.

So, there are, unsurprisingly, those who feel the need to complain for the sake of complaining about changing Homer’s plotline, adding the Sinon character.  <Sigh.>  Adaptations, additions, and edits have been a part of the business since, well, at least as far back as Homer, who drew from other versions of what we’d now call mythological tales.  Greek tragedies borrowed (stole?) from Homer, Hesiod, and whoever else was handy.  The Aeschylean, Sophoclean, and Euripidean versions of the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Orestes and Electra differ from each other in significant ways.  (Euripides’ Electra actually makes fun of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers.)  More recently, if you see an author’s name as part of a movie title (“Agatha Christie’s this,” “Bram Stoker’s that”), you can pretty much take it to the bank that there is little if any relationship between the film version and the original book.

Much of Curmie’s career as a scholar concentrated on these adaptations.  There’s no such thing as a direct translation, of course, but there are certainly adapted works that try to keep as closely as possible to the original.  Others, there’s just a hint.  For example, there’s Brian Friel’s play Living Quarters: After Hippolytus.  Without the subtitle, even a perceptive and well-educated theatre-goer might miss the reference, as there are a lot of differences between Friel’s version and Euripides’, extending far past character names and settings.  Some of these adaptations really work; some don’t, usually because they beat the reader/spectator over the head with their presumed contemporary relevance.

Curmie isn’t going to talk about whether an idea worked or didn’t until he sees the final product.  He can speculate, as he did in discussing the Arena Stage production of Inherit the Wind, but that’s as far as he’ll go.  He could watch “The Odyssey” and love it… or hate it… or think it was “meh.”  He could think including Sinon or casting Page was brilliant or stupid or somewhere in-between.  But Christopher Nolan has proven to be someone who makes a lot of good choices, and Curmie isn’t going to criticize him without knowing a lot more than he does now.

Reviews from the London screening have all been positive, even enthusiastic.  Whether you or I agree, Gentle Reader, will be a matter of individual taste.  Maybe we think Nolan hit the proverbial home run; maybe we think he hit a lazy one-hop grounder to the shortstop… or struck out.  But one thing we must agree on is that he handled the casting controversies, especially the bit involving Elliot Page, brilliantly.  We know that he is heavily involved in the marketing of his films, and he got mountains of publicity for a project that hadn’t been released yet… and made the right-wing pundits look like idiots in the process.  Whether Nolan actively encouraged the mistaken belief that Page was to play Achilles or just sat back to watch the self-inflicted carnage almost doesn’t matter.

There’s one other aspect that Curmie, as a theatre historian, can’t help but mention.  When the famous Playboy riots happened at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907, the theatre’s directors kept the doors open.  For several nights, the audience couldn’t hear the performance over the boos of the protestors.  But—key point here—those folks had to buy a ticket to get inside to boo.  And a lot of other people wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  They bought tickets, too.  Curmie predicts “The Odyssey” will sell well, whether or not it’s a great, or even good, film.  Whatever you think of him as a director, Christopher Nolan is a bright lad.  Or maybe he just paid attention in Theatre History class.

The Casting of "The Odyssey" and Believing Rumors

 

Curmie has written numerous times about variations on the theme of casting decisions for plays, movies, and television series.  In June of 2017, he discussed the controversy surrounding the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar, in which the title character bore more than passing resemblance to Donald Trump.  In 2021, it was the brouhaha at the University of Michigan when a Distinguished Professor of Music showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in class.  The following spring, Curmie argued that no, you don’t have to be disabled to play Richard III.  In February of ’23, he suggested that obeying the terms of the rights contract shouldn’t lead to the cancelation of a production of Waiting for Godot.

In April of 2023, Curmie wrote about the casting of black-presenting actress Adele James as Cleopatra in what Netflix would have had us believe was a documentary.  And in January of 2025, the topic was the entirely white-presenting chorus (some of the leads were BIPOC) for a production of the musical Elf in Sacramento.  Oh, and there was a lengthy comment on a post on Ethics Alarms in 2021 about the casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn; that one was designated a Comment of the Day.

Anyway, here we go again.  Curmie thought that if he wrote about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film version of The Odyssey, he’d concentrate on Nolan’s fondness for the controversial (?) feminist (?) translation of Emily Wilson, which Curmie definitely wants to read.  But he’s going to write instead about the three (Count ‘em!  Three!) casting decisions that have raised the ire of conservative commentators.  Well, there are three that Curmie knows about; there may be others.  The first and third, chronologically in terms of the brouhaha, are pretty similar and frankly rather boring: OMG, Nolan cast a black woman (Lupita Nyong’o) as Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and a black man (rapper Travis Scott) as a bardic narrator figure!  They should look like the originals, you see.  <Sigh.>

Ahem.  

First off, there almost certainly were no real-life originals.  Were there Bronze Age places called Troy and Greece?  Yes.  Was there a war between the Greeks and Trojans, fought at least partially at Troy?  Perhaps.  Were there important (royal) people named Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, etc.?  Unlikely, but possible.  Are the events of The Odyssey (Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, sirens…) even plausible?  Uh, no.  Homer, whoever he, she, or they may have been, either made that stuff up or perhaps inherited some of it from other writers not lucky enough to have had their works preserved.  Oh, and that line the right-wing critics like to quote about Helen being “the face that launched a thousand ships”?  That wasn’t Homer; that was Christopher Marlowe, over two millennia later.  Curmie’s a theatre historian; he knows this stuff.

Secondly, even assuming that there were real-life historical figures who served as the basis for Homer’s epic… uh… wouldn’t they be and look… uh… Greek?  As far as Curmie can tell, there is not a single Greek cast member, or indeed with any Greek forebears.  Interesting, that.  It may be a bit strong to use the term “racist” to describe those who see no problem with casting Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway but get righteously indignant over Lupita Nyong’o or Zendaya, but not by much.  People of Greek heritage who claim cultural appropriation have more of a point than those who want white actors only.

Is it a bit too cute for Nolan to justify casting Scott by suggesting that rappers are the closest thing we have today to the reception of ancient texts via bardic oral tradition?  Sure.  But it’s not a totally crazy idea, and Curmie, being of the wrong generation and race to fully appreciate Scott’s work, isn’t going to criticize that casting without as much as seeing the film.

But all of this leaves the source of peak indignation from the usual suspects, namely the casting of Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page.  There were rumors that Page, at a slender 5’1”, was to play Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.  The response of Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty was predictably assholic: “You might even remember Brad Pitt played Achilles in a movie 20 years ago, meaning we go from Brad Pitt to a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds. That’s the person who’s going to be playing the greatest warrior in history, because to the left, that is normal. That’s okay.”  A little later, he proclaims that Helen was white.  Nothing to see here; move along.

Others, like the insufferable Elon Musk, also piled on.  The problem, though, is that whereas there’s no legitimate reason to object to Nyong’o’s casting, Page as Achilles is indeed a bit of a stretch, to say the least.  True, Achilles appears as a ghost (you will recall, Gentle Reader that he was killed by Paris in The Iliad), and it might be possible to film only close-ups, or in full armor, or with distortions, or whatever.  But Elliot Page would do well to lift a Bronze Age sword, let alone wield one well enough to defeat Hector one-on-one.

But here, Gentle Reader, is where Curmie urges you to read his introduction to this topic carefully: “there were rumors” that Page would play Achilles.  As of this writing, the imdb page for the film lists Page as a cast member, but doesn’t specify a role.  There has been no official announcement, but it is now reported that that Page is expected to play Elpenor, the youngest member of Odysseus’s crew, who gets drunk and falls off a roof to his death.  He’s the first ghost Odysseus encounters in the Underworld (Achilles appears later), and causes some angst because Odysseus had left him unburied.  Elpenor, like Achilles, is a relatively minor character in The Odyssey; either or both could end up as little more than a cameo… or could be expanded into something more.  We shall see.

When Curmie first read about this controversy, the site he was reading proclaimed that Page would play Achilles.  Even Finnerty introduced his screed by noting that Page reportedly would be in that role.  But human nature being what it is, a rumor became a report, and the report became a “fact.” 

Were he of a cynical or snarky disposition (perish the thought!), Curmie might suggest that Christopher Nolan is not an idiot.  Announce that Elliot Page is in the cast.  Don’t announce who’s playing Achilles (if indeed the character will actually appear).  Maybe even get a minion to accidentally-on-purpose mention that Page was under consideration (leaving out the “for maybe five seconds” part).  Result: well, the right-wing critics look like folks who believe articles in The Onion.  More importantly, there is a mountain of free publicity: we’re still two months away from the release date, and “The Odyssey” is getting a lot more headlines than anything that’s actually in theaters now.  Perhaps, just perhaps, Team Nolan dangled a particularly juicy fake story out there… and Finneran, Musk, et al., rose to the bait.

Curmie suppresses a smirk.  Oh, OK, no, he doesn’t.