Elliot Page And Lupita Nyong’o Have Turned The Odyssey’s Final Press Push Into Two Solo Campaigns

The Odyssey opens July 17, and with three days left before release, its two most talked-about supporting cast members have doubled down instead of dialing back.

Elliot Page, a woman who pretends to be a man, escalated first. In a June 24 Democracy Now interview that resurfaced this week as Breitbart reported on it July 14, Page went beyond defending his casting and argued against the concept of binary gender itself. “In terms of looking at nature as if it’s some sort of cis hetero patriarchal structure is absurd, and that this, you know, gender binary that we’ve created is nothing but a quaint little myth,” Page said. She went further, telling the same interview that traditional teachings about “men being superior, women being inferior... it being this heterosexual existence is just completely false,” and that this view has been “suppressed” from wider acceptance. Page plays Sinon, a Greek soldier, and also narrates the film.

Lupita Nyong’o kept pace on a different track. In a new interview published July 15, an interviewer told her “the women run this,” and Nyong’o agreed with a simple “Yeah,” before adding that Nolan “chooses to linger with them and tells the story also from their perspective,” giving audiences “a whole new appreciation” of the epic. It’s at least the third time she’s made a version of this argument in the weeks before release. She previously said Homer spent “very little time” on women’s perspectives and joked about wanting to confront the poet directly and ask, “Remember us?” Geeks + Gamers noted the obvious rebuttal: Penelope anchors the entire emotional structure of the poem, Athena drives the plot from the first page to the last, and Circe and Calypso each reroute Odysseus’ entire journey. Women aren’t absent from Homer’s Odyssey. They’re driving it.

What makes both campaigns strange is that neither actor is playing a role built for this kind of spotlight. Nyong’o described her own parts in the film, plural, as “small in terms of how much screen time I have,” telling Collider, “They’re small but mighty.” Page’s role as Sinon is similarly minor, enough that most of the pre-release confusion over her casting came from a single short clip in the trailer rather than any substantial role reveal. Two performers with limited screen time have become the two most quoted voices of the entire press tour, while actors in the film’s largest roles, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, have stayed almost entirely out of the ideological conversation.

That imbalance is the real story here. A three-hour, IMAX-format retelling of one of the oldest stories in Western literature is entering theaters with its cultural conversation dominated not by its leads or its director’s filmmaking, but by two supporting actors relitigating gender theory and feminist reinterpretation days before anyone outside a premiere audience has seen the finished film. Nolan has called the surrounding backlash “irrelevant” and says viewers can’t judge a film they haven’t seen. Fair enough. But if the film’s own supporting cast keeps making the case that gender is a myth and Homer shortchanged women before a single ticket sells, audiences aren’t being given much choice about what conversation they’re walking into.

Why are the actors with the least screen time doing the most to define what this movie is supposed to be about?

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