So Christopher Nolan has gone and done it. The absolute madman has committed the perfect sin. An act of treachery and defiance so brazen that only a .gif of Jack Nicholson nodding evilly can do it proper justice. He cast Lupita Nyong’o as, of all people, Helen of Troy.
This is Lupita Nyong’o:
I’m usually fairly ambivalent about casting actors to play the roles of characters that are a different race in the source material. But given the wider context here, on this occasion, I couldn’t be happier. I had my fingers crossed since the rumors began. Perhaps even better is the rumor, unconfirmed at the time of this writing, that Elliot Page is going to be playing Achilles. Page, you’re probably aware, is transgender, and played exclusively female characters up until 2017. His Achilles casting is almost definitely fake news (Achilles has a very, very small cameo in Homer’s Odyssey, and the rumor that Page will be playing the much more narratively important character of Odysseus’ young shipmate Elpenor makes a lot of sense) but even given that, Page as Achilles would still make perfect visual sense as Achilles in the context of the story and I would fight anyone to argue otherwise.
Now, I want to back up a moment and say that I’m not trying to use Nyong’o’s Blackness or Page’s Transness as a weapon against anybody, nor do I believe Christopher Nolan is. He’s not some troll; he has a creative vision and every choice he makes seems to fit that vision in some way. Nyong’o and Page are a fine actors and not just a couple of minorities. To fall into the trap of viewing them as such, or seeing this decision as an act of stunt casting just to piss certain people off, wouldn’t actually make one much better than the people who are actually mad about this.
But boy, men on Twitter with marble statue profile pictures are shitting blood.
The so-called manosphere, and the far-right ethnonationalist movement that are the meat and potatoes of the Trump administration (though, at this point, I repeat myself) are obsessed with Ancient Rome and Greece as the … well, for want of a better term, the Platonic ideal of Western Culture. But as I have written before it is a fake image, sold by Hollywood and by the handed-down fantasies of European nationalists who have all envisioned themselves as the heirs to the mightiest empires that ever existed as long as you ignore the Mongols and Ottomans.
The Iliad and The Odyssey are considered the pinnacle of the Sacred Texts among this crowd, right up there with Beowulf, the Poetic Edda, The Turner Diaries, the Trump Bible, and something called “My Struggle” whose authorship escapes me.
With this context in mind, Nolan’s upcoming blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey crosses two bright red lines in Trumpworld: You do not mess with the whiteness of Helen of Troy, and you do not mess with the masculinity of Achilles.
You need to understand that what Christopher Nolan is doing here is the equivalent to slipping deep into a xenomorph hive and slapping the queen.
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I don’t think I’ve seen Statue PFP Twitter this apoplectic about anything, maybe ever. Elon Musk himself, who thinks of himself as Agamemnon and frequently depicts himself in stolen valor wearing the armor of a general or emperor of Rome (he’s at least got the salute down pat) is leading the charge that Christopher Nolan is a race traitor on a mission to destroy Western Civilization. For over a week, the news feed has been nothing but this, because nothing else of any importance is happening in the world.
And I’m absolutely thrilled, because for the first time, the far right are beginning to understand that they will never win the culture war. Or, if they’re not at that point yet, at least they’re at the bargaining stage. They think they can organize a sufficient boycott to sink this movie, or that maybe Trump can step in somehow, or maybe the nation of Greece can actually sue Nolan to prevent this from happening.
To get a sense of their mindset, here: There is a growing and intensifying anger that we are still seeing minorities in movies and entertainment halfway through 2026, when the second inauguration of Trump last year was supposed to have put a definitive end to that. As I have written recently, we are still not seeing a strong right-wing turn in entertainment media, despite the best efforts of Trump-loyalist oligarchs to reshape the media landscape for their shitty attempt at forced cultural revolution.
Perhaps they feel particularly betrayed by the fact that this is also a Christpher Nolan movie. The only thing whiter than a Nolan movie is a Wes Anderson movie.
To understand why they take this so personally, we’ll start with Helen. In Greek myth, Helen was the half-mortal daughter of Zeus and queen of Sparta, and was the most beautiful woman in the world. Immediately you know that these men are going to have some pretty narrow rules for casting “the most beautiful woman in the world” and they’re going to be strongly correlated with melanin. What you need to understand that these guys won’t even tolerate a Greek woman in this role. Helen of Troy must be White-white. That means Germanic or Nordic as an entry criterion.
In fact, even contemporaneous depictions of Helen don’t pass the bar of acceptable attractiveness for today’s Homeric gatekeepers. Check out this dipshit who pulls up some old Helen paintings to illustrate his point, but comes to a screeching, sputtering halt when he sees that one of them looks a little chubby. “Not great!” but at least not black.
Their gold standard to these guys is Diane Kruger, a German actress, who played Helen in 2004’s Troy, very loosely based on The Iliad.
But Kruger is pushing 50, now. In demanding an urgent recast for The Odyssey, the online protectors of Homer’s legacy have a short list of viable contenders to step into Helen’s loose, gilded, semi-transparent veil.
By short, I mean one, and by list, I mean Sydney Sweeney.
The right’s Sydney Sweeney Derangement Syndrome is at least a few years old now as they have all decided that she’s Republican-coded and a stealth MAGA, so the project to move cinema to the right involves shoving Sydney Sweeney into every-fucking-thing.
This exact same outrage played out last year when there were rumors of a live action Legend of Zelda game with Hunter Schafer in talks to play the elvish Princess Zelda. Most normal people thought that was a great idea since Schafer looks more elvish than anyone anybody has ever seen, but she’s also a trans woman, so there was an outraged Twitter campaign to make them cast Sydney Sweeney instead.
You can tell how much of a bubble these people spend their entire waking lives in when they try to argue that casting Sydney Sweeney as Helen of Troy would give the movie a big star-power boost. Sydney Sweeney’s most prominent movie role was as a side-character in the Madame Web movie that nobody saw. Most people have never heard of her.
Here’s my hot take: Casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy isn’t just okay, it isn’t just good. At this point, in this societal context, given the predictable reaction, casting a white woman would almost have been downright cinematic malpractice.
It is important to make them understand that these stories don’t belong to them. They neither understand, nor appreciate them, and the vandalism they want to do to them is a vandalism far worse than playing with the skin tone of any one character in any one adaptation.
Take the Elliot Page Achilles rumor. There is absolutely no evidence that Elliot Page is playing Achilles in The Odyssey. All we know is that he is in the cast with an undisclosed role. The rumor is based entirely on an assumption and a misconception: The assumption is that Page will have a major role, and the misconception is that Achilles is a major character in The Odyssey.
This is wrong, but the fact that they assume this is a huge red flag that they don’t know jack about this story.
Here’s more evidence: The intensity of the outrage, beyond the floor level of outrage that comes with casting a trans person in anything, is the sacrilege of casting a short, lean, boyish trans man as the rippling tower of abs and biceps that is the mighty, square-jawed Achilles, paragon of masculinity and Earth’s mightiest and most virtuous hero.
Achilles was not that.
To understand and appreciate ancient myths like Homer and his contemporaries is to understand that there is not necessarily any one canonical or “correct” way to depict these characters. Their physical appearance can change depending on their role in the story. In The Iliad, yes, he’s a big muscly man. In other stories, though, he is so androgynous that he can, and does, pass for a girl.
In The Odyssey, first of all, Achilles is dead. He died in the Trojan War, which takes place before this. To the extent that he is mentioned in The Odyssey, he appears briefly toward the end of the story as a pale, withered ghost who regrets his life and wishes he had never chosen to be a warrior so that he would still be alive. He is depleted and frail. Casting a smaller actor for this role would be absolutely justified and exactly what the Homeric poets would have imagined. It would be paying Homer enormous respect to cast somebody like Page.
But again, we don’t know that Page is playing Achilles, and in fact, it would not surprise me at all if they cut out the Achilles cameo entirely. If I was the one stuffing The Odyssey into a single feature length run time, I would absolutely cut that scene.
What’s crucial to understand about this film’s right-wing critics is that if any of them understood Homer, they would hate it. To the extent that they have heard of Homer’s epics, they presume them to be simplistic and uncomplicated stories of rippling Greek heroes fighting and fucking. In The Iliad, Achilles fights the evil Trojans and fucks beautiful women. In The Odyssey, Odysseus fights terrifying monsters and fucks beautiful women. End of book.
This is the only kind of story they want to see, because moral ambiguity is woke. They kind of just want Bible stories—instructional stories that point out in explicit terms who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and how to be a good guy. Being good and virtuous, of course, means being masculine, and being masculine means fighting and fucking.
Homer’s characters, in reality, are extremely complex. Achilles isn’t even the hero of The Iliad. To the extent that there are good guys and bad guys (complicated!) the Greeks are much closer to the bad guys side. While Achilles isn’t exactly a villain (complicated!) he is arrogant, impulsive, whiny, gets the people he loves killed, gets himself killed, then regrets everything he did in the afterlife. He was indeed Greece’s most skilled warrior, but that doesn’t make him a good person. He, and arguably Odysseus as well, are better described as antiheroes.
Boneheads with handles like “Roman Helmet Guy” want us to think that any suggestions that Homer’s protagonists are complex, multifaceted, or otherwise imperfect are lies insidiously injected into the story by woke modern translators.
But the people who seek to intricately restore these ancient stories the way they were originally told, to keep their context alive in languages that we can understand, in order to carry them into the future, they are not the vandals. The vandals are the “Roman Helmet Guys” and the Statue PFPs and the RETVRN idiots who want to do to the classics what DOGE did to the federal government—take a chainsaw to them. Cut all of the art out of them. Reduce them to paint-by-numbers moral lessons.
The vandals are the guys who now vow to use AI tools to strip Homer of characters and storylines that hurt their feelings.
These guys stomping their feet and shaking their fists and vowing revenge on Christopher Nolan and the modern Homer translators for this indignity actually consider themselves the descendants and heirs of Achilles and fancy that they are channeling his warrior spirit. That by boycotting films because minorities were involved in their production is heroic and akin to the storming of Troy.
They do not realize how pathetic and weak they look right now. They don’t understand how genuinely comical they look when they flip out like this, just like when Christopher Rufo thought he sounded like the president at the end of Independence Day when he declared “we must break the Barrel” when Cracker Barrel briefly considered changing its logo.
This isn’t them showing strength, despite what they might believe. This is them inadvertently rolling over and exposing their soft bellies. This is them understanding that they have been wounded and trying to puff themselves up and look large and intimidating. But their indignant rage is their poker tell. They are showing that they don’t hold the cards here.
One of the reasons it is important to keep taking artistic license with art, making artistic and unconventional decisions in casting, keeping these stories vibrant and active and alive, is to show Greek Statue MAGA that these stories Do. Not. Belong. To. Them. They don’t belong to the people who haven’t read them or understood or appreciate their nuances. Homer doesn’t “belong to white people.” It belongs to humanity, but more specifically, it belongs to those of us who appreciate it. Who treat it as art, which it is.
If you’ve never read The Odyssey, or if you have but you have no meaningful understanding of it, if your claim to ownership of the classics is that you very roughly share a skin color with its authors, then you’ve utterly abdicated your authority over the curatorship of our common human heritage. Sit the fuck down.
The people who would kill Homer forever are the gatekeepers who would refuse to acknowledge the nuance of these stories and would seek to prevent them from being told. Those who would mandate that The Odyssey is an uncomplicated story about a heroic Chad Thundercock who kills a cyclops and then fucks a goddess. End of book. No other interpretation permitted.
But those people will not win. Homer will live on. I think the Odyssey tantrum has made that very clear.
It’s not like this isn’t also a win situation for the right as well, if only they’ll choose to see it that way. We are the ones keeping the story alive. It’s not like Helen of Troy is “just black, now,” forever, permanently. There’s absolutely nothing preventing Sydney Sweeney from playing her in the future. The 70s gang thriller The Warriors was based on Xenophon. Xenophon still exists. The only reason you haven’t re-adapted Xenophon without any black people in it is because you haven’t bothered, or let’s face it, haven’t read it. Don’t worry, we’ll keep it, and Homer, alive for you.
I'm writing a book about geeky men who are wrecking the world in a misguided attempt to be Achilles. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here!
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Some News on My Book, and a Requiem For a Career
Next week I’m going to be submitting a 20-page book proposal to a real, living, big-deal literary agent, but it feels like being tagged out as I’m sliding into home base.
These dipshits can't even write their own fanfiction, they plan to ask the AI to do it. 🙄
Since when is “complicated” pejorative? 😂