Nolan defends modern dialogue in The Odyssey: "It might bite me on the ass"

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Tom Holland’s Telemachus tells Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, “my dad is coming home.” It’s just a single line of dialogue revealed in a trailer for The Odyssey back in May — but it certainly got people talking.

Holland and pretty much the entire cast of Christopher Nolan’s epic speak in plain old American English, which some have taken issue with. After all, this is an adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek epic the Odyssey, and “my dad is coming home” perhaps doesn’t fit the setting.

Nolan’s The Odyssey is officially described as a “mythic action epic,” but ever since we got our first look at Matt Damon as Odysseus, the heroic king of Ithaca, the writer and director has faced questions about his movie’s historical accuracy — or inaccuracy, as some have put it. Those questions ramped up in December last year, when the debut trailer for The Odyssey revealed Agamemnon’s imposing, all black suit. As one commenter joked at the time: “Had no idea Ancient Greeks used Batman helmets and sailed in Viking ships. Seriously, how hard is it to look at the picture of what the real thing looked like?”

Nolan defended The Odyssey from such complaints earlier this year , but now he’s explained, specifically, his decision around The Odyssey’s dialogue.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times , Nolan said he wanted to find “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people,” and so went for contemporary dialogue rather than artificially elevated speech.

But he admitted he might have called it wrong. “I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass,” he said, “but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer.”

Nolan went on to insist that his casting choices were, similarly, about putting contemporary faces on characters from ancient myth. For example, Lupita Nyong’o plays Helen of Troy, Jon Bernthal plays Sparta’s King Menelaus, and Zendaya plays the goddess Athena.

“These are mythological figures, iconic in some ways,” Nolan said. “I wanted to cast it big, get the finest bunch of actors,” because, as the LA Times put it, their familiar faces would help a modern audience feel at home in an ancient story.

The Odyssey hits theaters on July 17, 2026.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.