SerpApi.Org
Anne Hathaway and Christopher Nolan talk the creative approach to fleshing out the women of the film.
Key Points
- Christopher Nolan and Anne Hathaway talk about bringing more depth to the female characters of The Odyssey.
- Past translations routinely paint these figures as villains. “This was the opportunity to dive deep,” the actress says.
- A female friend told Hathaway that “she had actually been invited into The Odyssey for the first time ever.”
Anne Hathaway recalls an experience shared by a close female friend after watching The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s take on the epic poem of ancient Greece.
“She had such an emotional reaction to seeing it,” the Oscar winner says during Entertainment Weekly’s Around the Table video series. “When I was talking to her about why, she said, ‘I’ve always felt the women get blamed for everything in The Odyssey. The thing that I loved about this movie is you were all given so much dimension. I felt like, each one of you, it was so clear that you had so much more going on.’”
The Odyssey is the story about clever Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his return trip home after the sacking of Troy, a voyage that extends across years after various encounters with a cyclops, an island of giants, a witch, a goddess, sirens, a killer whirlpool, and more. Hathaway stars as Penelope, Odysseus’ wife who’s stuck at home in Ithaca keeping the gluttonous suitors squatting in their castle at bay.
When her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), grows frustrated over his mother’s inaction with the suitors, she quickly reminds him that men will do as please and the suitors will likely retaliate violently if they are dismissed.
“I love this text, I love Greek mythology, and I’d never really gone deep with Penelope either,” Hathaway remarks during the discussion with Nolan and her castmates. “I accepted her at face value. When I read your interpretation of it, I realized that this was the moment, this was the opportunity to dive deeper and see her in a multidimensional way. Maybe the way that she was described was the role that she had to play, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that was all who she was.”
The film, powered by Nolan’s script, goes well beyond the descriptions of all the characters in Homer’s poem.
Samantha Morton’s enchantress Circe turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, though the film contextualizes her within the human casualties of war. Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen of Troy is more often blamed for starting the Trojan War, though many characters point out it was just an excuse for Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) to break Troy’s control over the trade routes.
As for Charlize Theron’s goddess Calypso, the one who keeps Odysseus on her island for several years, she attempts to restore his memories and motivate the hero to return home, despite her love for him.
Amid the wide-ranging conversation with some of his cast — including Hathaway, Damon, Holland, Robert Pattinson, and John Leguizamo — the filmmaker shares his creative approach to these characters.
“For me, a lot of that, honestly, is casting,” he says, “because when you look at Homer, you look at the poem and what it offers in terms of the female characters, in terms of all the characters, it’s actually very simple. It’s deceptively simple. Each era has really been able to interpret those characters according to the interests at the time and then the values at the time.”
When he first spoke with Hathaway about the Penelope role, Nolan says they knew the actress would “have to know everything about the reality of that character, not just the symbolic or iconic aspects of the character, but who she is underneath and what that underlying reality is.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
“We’re trying to flesh out the story and make it real,” Nolan adds, “and I think that applied to Charlize’s Calypso and Lupita’s Helen and everything, really.”
It paid off.
Hathaway shares of her friend, “She felt like she had actually been invited into The Odyssey for the first time ever.”
Watch the full Around the Table interview with the cast of The Odyssey in the video above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
