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The casting of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ has sparked debates over race and historical authenticity. But the Homeric epics emerged from an ancient world with a very different understanding of race and endured not because they belong to one people, but because they speak to universal human experiences.
Since the first trailer of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ released on 22 December 2025, the casting of Himesh Patel, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, and Travis Scott in key characters have been one of the most contentious points in conversations about the film. The argument goes like this: the Homeric epics are the wellspring of Western literary traditions and therefore have no room for people of colour. But this is a racist misreading of these ancient poems.
The Mycenaean Greeks were not and did not think of themselves as 'white' in the way we think of race now. Their world was as multi-ethnic as ours, with trade networks spanning from the Hittites in Central Europe and West Asia to the Egyptians and the Aethiopians in northern Africa. In fact, both the Iliad and the Odyssey refer to the Aethiopian king Memnon as a formidable warrior and one of the legendary heroes of the Trojan war alongside Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Odysseus.
Focussing on the race or ethnicity of these characters also completely misses the reason these epics have retained so much of their power well into the modern era. While it is true that the Iliad and the Odyssey — like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — are deeply rooted in their respective cultural traditions, their enduring power lies in their universality. These brilliant poems remain relevant and powerful millennia after they were first sung because they speak to universal human experiences.
This is why I admire Peter Brook’s adaptation of the Mahabharata based on a stage-play by Jean-Claude Carrière. An international production with an ensemble cast of 21 actors from across the world, Carrière and Brook’s adaptation focused on the humanistic heart of the Mahabharata mythology and condensed its superhuman characters into flawed human beings driven by greed, lust, and thirst for power, wealth, and legacy. Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of the Odyssey does much the same. At one point in his adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’, when Odysseus asks Athena why the Gods do not speak in ways humans understand, the goddess of wisdom answers, “Who does not understand pain? Or blood?”
Each retelling, each reinterpretation, as long as it remains authentic to these universal themes, adds to the legacy of these epics. They build on their ancient foundations to mirror contemporary realities. And these connections go beyond thematic parallels.
These epics also contain a surprising level of intertextuality. The trial of the bow, for example, appears across the Odyssey, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. In the Odyssey, the returning Odysseus must string his bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes to hit a target on other side in a display of ‘kairos’ — a specific word that the Ancient Greeks used to describe the right, critical, or opportune moment activated by human agency. This incident finds parallels in both Indian epics when a hero has to prove his worthiness. While Rama breaks the bow, Arjuna pierces the eye of a revolving fish with an arrow by looking at its reflection. Both the Iliad and the Mahabharata also include stories of great warriors — Achilles in the Iliad and Arjuna in the Mahabharata — disguising themselves as women, only to reveal their identity when they can no longer hide their martial instincts. It does not matter which came first, because they are all, in their own ways, testament to humanity and its many faces.
Nolan’s interpretation also succeeds where assinine, paint-by-the-numbers adaptations of these epics fail. By connecting the sack of Troy, the trick of the Trojan Horse, and the breakdown of Zeus’ law — based on the ‘Xenia’, or the Ancient Greek code of hospitality towards foreigners and guests as a moral obligation (mirrored by the Hindu concept of ‘atithi devoh bhavaha’ or the idea of strangers as gods in disguise) — with rising xenophobia, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the collapse of international law following the Gaza holocaust, Nolan has made The Odyssey profoundly relevant to our time.
Once we look past the surface, these are the reasons why these epics have survived thousands of years and will survive thousands more. It does not matter who tells these stories, or who plays these characters, as long as they touch on the most elusive parts of the human experience — the interstices between love, grief, pride, guilt, trauma, and the profound human ability to recognise the best and worst of our most secret self in the face of another.
Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is currently playing in cinemas.
