Christopher Nolan Dismisses Backlash Over ‘The Odyssey’ Casting: ‘Comes With the Territory’

Christopher Nolan isn’t letting online outrage rattle him ahead of the release of The Odyssey.

The 56-year-old director is brushing off months of MAGA-fueled backlash over the film’s casting and design choices. “Comes with the territory,” Nolan said of the criticism swirling around his Homer adaptation in an article The Telegraph published on Friday, July 10. “But look, these conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”

The movie is based on Homer’s ancient poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his long, dangerous journey home after the Trojan War, as he battles monsters, gods and other obstacles to reunite with his wife and son.

Nolan compared the pushback to what he faced when Warner Bros. hired him to reboot the Batman series in 2003. “When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents. And what I learnt over my time on that trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all. What you have to do is honor the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can,” he said, per the report.

“In the end, fans of the property — even when we were doing something that was not what they would have done — enjoyed the sincerity of the attempt to put as good a version of it on screen as we could,” Nolan continued. “All I can do is make the best film I possibly can in the most sincere way. It’s very different from how anyone else would do it, but that’s what adaptation is.”

As In Touch previously reported, Elon Musk, 55, spoke out when it emerged Lupita Nyong’o, 43, had been cast as Helen of Troy. “Chris Nolan has lost his integrity,” Musk wrote on X at the time. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh, 40, also went after Nyong’o on X: “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’ … Nolan is technically talented but a coward.”

Musk also amplified posts mocking Elliot Page, 39, after unverified rumors spread that the actor would play Achilles. Page is actually playing the warrior Sinon, Odysseus’s cousin.