I just saw The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s 2026 epic adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, on his long and punishing journey home after the Trojan War. The film moves between Odysseus’s decade-long journey across treacherous seas and the crisis unfolding back home in Ithaca, where his wife and son are running out of time holding off a palace full of suitors who want the throne.
The film is technically Odysseus’s story but the women surrounding him are what give it texture and meaning. Each one represents something different, and Nolan’s casting choices alone tell you he understood that. Here is every significant woman in the film and what she actually means to the story.
1. Penelope | Anne Hathaway
Penelope is the emotional anchor of the entire film. While Odysseus is lost at sea, she is holding a palace together alone, fending off suitors who have invaded her home, eaten her food, and are plotting her son’s death, all while the entire kingdom assumes her husband is dead. She refuses to remarry and devises a test: she will marry whoever can string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads, knowing full well none of them can do it. It is a stall tactic wrapped in a dare.
What makes Penelope compelling is that her loyalty is not passive. She is not simply waiting. She is strategizing, protecting Telemachus, and maintaining the household with a quiet authority that none of the suitors can quite figure out how to break. Anne Hathaway carries this with real gravity.
2. Athena | Zendaya
Athena is the goddess of wisdom and warfare, and in this film she serves as Odysseus’s protector and guide throughout his journey. Zendaya plays a dual role, both the goddess and the young Trojan priestess whose death Odysseus is responsible for after his soldiers desecrate her temple during the sack of Troy. Athena assumes the priestess’s form to haunt Odysseus with visions of what he has done.
This is one of the film’s most interesting choices. Athena is both the consequence of Odysseus’s worst act and the force guiding him toward redemption. She is punishment and protection at the same time. Zendaya was a natural fit for a role that required that kind of quiet, otherworldly grace, though I will admit I wanted more screen time from the character.
3. Circe | Samantha Morton
Circe is a witch and goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea. When Odysseus and his surviving crew land there seeking refuge, she turns his men into pigs. Odysseus eventually persuades her to reverse the spell, and she becomes a crucial source of information, warning him that to reach home he must first cross into the underworld.
The film’s portrayal of Circe is one of its most interesting choices because her hostility toward the arriving soldiers reads less like villainy and more like the reaction of a woman who has watched enough men arrive on her shore to know exactly what they are capable of. Her yard full of discarded armor says everything. The transformation sequence is genuinely memorable, and Morton brings enough emotional complexity to the role that it becomes impossible to see Circe as simply a villain. She is a woman with very good reasons for everything she does.
4. Calypso | Charlize Theron
Calypso is a nymph who finds Odysseus washed ashore on her island of Ogygia after his entire crew has been killed. She nurses him back to health, falls for him, and keeps him there for seven years by drugging him with lotus flowers that cause memory loss. He does not knowingly betray Penelope because he does not remember Penelope exists.
Eventually Calypso feels pity for his longing and lets him go. It is a small but significant moment. She loves him enough to release him, which is more than most of the men in this story manage for the women they claim to love. Charlize Theron brings a melancholy to the role that makes Calypso much more sympathetic rather than just an obstacle. Also I am here to report that Charlize Theron is still absolutely stunning.
5. Helen and Clytemnestra | Lupita Nyong’o
Lupita Nyong’o plays both sisters in a dual role that is one of the film’s best casting decisions. Helen is the wife of Menelaus whose abduction by Paris triggers the entire Trojan War. By the time we meet her in the film she is disfigured, a detail the film does not dwell on but does not hide either. The most beautiful woman in the world, reduced to a consequence of men’s wars.
Clytemnestra is Helen’s sister and Agamemnon’s wife. Her husband sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for fair seas to sail to Troy. Clytemnestra murdered him upon his return. The film presents this not as an act of madness but as a consequence. Agamemnon killed their child. She killed him for it. The casting of one actress in both roles draws a direct line between the two women and the destruction men brought into both their lives.
Now on the controversy surrounding casting a Black woman as Helen. I have zero interest in debating whether Lupita Nyong’o is beautiful enough to play the most beautiful woman in the world because the answer is obviously yes, case closed. And the argument about historical accuracy in a film filled with gods, mythical sea monsters, and a cast delivering their lines in American accents is hypocritical at best and something else entirely at worst. I won’t waste my breath further. What I will say is that Lupita brought grace and quiet power to both characters, even with less screen time than I expected from each.
6. Melantho | Mia Goth
Melantho is one of Penelope’s handmaids and a traitor. She is secretly the lover of Antinous, the lead suitor, and feeds him information including Telemachus’s plans to travel and find word of his father, which Antinous uses to plot the boy’s murder. She is a small role but a pointed one. The betrayal comes from inside the household, from a woman Penelope trusted, which makes the suitors’ threat feel even more suffocating. Mia Goth is no stranger to playing a woman with dangerous intentions and she slots into this role effortlessly.
The film overall is a stunning piece of work. Having recently watched The Return, a 2024 adaptation that takes a far more grounded approach to the same story, I was relieved when Nolan went the opposite direction and committed fully to the mythology.
The first hour kept me wondering if he would play it safe, and then the Cyclops arrived and the film became something else entirely. Three hours and every minute earned. The cinematography is beautiful, the editing is tight, and the cast delivers across the board.
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