Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been in cinemas since July 17, and now that audiences have actually seen the film, Jon Bernthal, who plays Helen’s husband Menelaus, has weighed in on the casting fight that dogged the production for months. Talking to DiscussingFilm, he said “there’s no one else in the world who could have done that”, adding, “I’m just so glad it was her.”
Bernthal tied his praise directly to what the role demands: Helen of Troy is the character whose beauty is said to have launched a thousand ships, so whoever plays her has to sell an entire mythology’s worth of obsession and conflict, not just look the part. Bernthal credited Nolan’s focus on interior character work for helping Nyong’o unlock that side of the performance.
It’s a pointed rebuttal to critics who reduced the casting debate to a conversation about appearance alone, and it actually comes from someone who was in the room alongside Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, and Travis Scott.
The Backlash, Briefly Recapped
As covered below, Elon Musk made the biggest noise about Nyong’o’s dual casting as Helen and her sister Clytemnestra. He kept returning to the topic for months, and even pitched the idea of Mel Gibson making a “historically correct” version of the story. Critics of the backlash, of course, pointed out that every major casting choice in the ensemble, Bernthal’s own included, drew some complaint online, which made the intensity aimed specifically at Nyong’o stand out.
With the film now out and playing in theaters, the noise surrounding the casting has calmed down. For the original timeline of the controversy, our full report follows below.
How the Backlash Started: Our Original Report
Elon Musk and Matt Walsh have openly criticised Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast actress Lupita Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra in his upcoming epic, The Odyssey. And while actor Alec Baldwin defended her, calling her one of the most beautiful women in the world, the backlash continues online. Well, Nyong’o has seen it too, and she’s admitted that she had no idea what The Odyssey even was before Nolan offered her the role. “I really had no idea what The Odyssey was,” she told Elle magazine. “I was like, ‘Oh, snap, I don’t know the first thing about this.’” But even that doesn’t disqualify her from playing the character.
The internet generally has a lot to say about casting choices in films these days. We’ve seen it with Ben Affleck’s Batman. We’ve seen it with Bella Ramsey as Ellie in The Last of Us. The call is for authenticity, but a lot of the time, they feel like personal attacks on the actors. Casting Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra in Nolan’s upcoming epic was probably always going to be controversial, but nobody would suspect that it would become one of the biggest arguments on the internet in 2026.
And after Musk posted on X in January that Nolan had “lost his integrity” by casting a Black woman as a character traditionally depicted as White and blonde, everyone had something to say. He seems to have gathered support from other controversial figures, too, like Matt Walsh, who called the director a coward and argued that “not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Well, he was wrong because there are plenty who believe she is. You just have to look at the comments underneath his post to see the countless amounts of people who actually support the casting.
But by May 17, Musk was back at it, writing that “casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu.”
What Musk and those who follow him seem to forget is that Nolan’s film isn’t a history lesson; it’s a fantasy based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, a story that also involves a one-eyed giant and a god who turns men into pigs. Hear the American accents? See those costume designs borrowing from about six different centuries? And wait, Matt Damon isn’t a Greek king either; was that an oversight, too?
Nyong’o eventually did read The Odyssey and The Iliad immediately after getting the role, and she listened to the Audra McDonald audiobook recording of The Iliad, too. “It is the best audiobook I have ever listened to,” she said.
She also pushed back on the idea that her role is just about physical appearance. “You can’t perform beauty,” she said. “I want to know who a character is. What is beyond beauty? What is beyond looks?”
That’s probably a reasonable question to ask about a character played by an actress who won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.
Nolan also has a history of casting the perfect people in great roles: Heath Ledger as the Joker, Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. His early films, from The Dark Knight Trilogy to Oppenheimer, featured mostly all-white casts, so maybe this was deliberate broadening or maybe it was purely about who could actually do the work.
The Odyssey opens in cinemas on July 17, 2026, and it includes a massive cast with a lot of diversity. There’s Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, and Travis Scott.
If the presence of the Cactus Jack rapper from Houston playing an ancient Greek storyteller doesn’t tell you that Nolan is not making a documentary, nothing probably will.
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