{"id":480100,"date":"2026-05-12T01:37:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T01:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/480100\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T01:37:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T01:37:17","slug":"elliot-page-as-achilles-is-not-as-far-fetched-as-it-seems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/480100\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliot Page as Achilles is not as far-fetched as it seems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the weekend, a rumor<\/a> spread online that Achilles, the grand hero of Homer\u2019s Iliad, might be played in Christopher Nolan\u2019s film version of The Odyssey by the trans actor Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page. Unsurprisingly, the reaction was swift and condemnatory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Every time there\u2019s even a hint about what this movie might be like, it is scrutinized by critics who seem determined to convict Nolan in advance of desecrating Homer\u2019s great classic. First, there was alarm over non-white actors playing Greek characters \u2014 especially the rumored casting of Lupita Nyong\u2019o as the luminous beauty Helen of Troy, a choice that incensed Elon Musk<\/a>. Then came last week\u2019s trailer<\/a>, which featured lines that some people found overly chatty; \u201cMy dad is coming home!\u201d pouts Tom Holland as Odysseus\u2019s son Telemachus. And now there\u2019s Page.<\/p>\n

To an extent, the sensitivity is warranted. Classics of the Western canon have certainly been belittled and defiled by their supposedly expert curators in the academy. A foremost offender is the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Emily Wilson, who introduced her overhyped 2018 translation of The Odyssey by denouncing<\/a> \u201cthe gendered metaphor of the \u2018faithful\u2019 translation\u201d. Nolan has signaled<\/a> his preference for Wilson\u2019s version, which is purposefully deflated<\/a> and flippant in tone. This may account for the language in Nolan\u2019s latest trailer.<\/p>\n

The fear here is that we\u2019re going to get a massive blockbuster version of the spiteful deconstructionism we see in books like Vassar professor Curtis Dozier\u2019s The White Pedestal<\/a>,\u00a0classicist Donna Zuckerberg\u2019s\u00a0Not All Dead White Men<\/a>, or Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta\u2019s Classicism and Other Phobias<\/a>. If so, then turning the Greeks\u2019 finest man of war into an emaciated trans person would represent the ultimate insult.<\/p>\n

However, we don\u2019t actually know yet whether Page will be playing Achilles. Even if it is true, the choice might make better sense in context than some critics recognize. The key thing about Achilles in The Odyssey, as opposed to his grandeur in the Iliad, is that he\u2019s been undone by death. He appears among the gibbering, blood-streaked ghosts that crowd around the living and beg for a taste of their lost existence.<\/p>\n

Achilles in The Odyssey is therefore the drained shadow of an unmade non-man, yearning for the time when he was real and alive. His power sapped, he bitterly regrets the trade-off he made by dying young in exchange for immortal fame. \u201cI would rather be a serf and till a poor man\u2019s field,\u201d his ghost says<\/a> to Odysseus, \u201cthan rule among all the dead in their decay.\u201d It\u2019s part of Homer\u2019s greatness that he both celebrates the glory of martial valor and undercuts it with this harrowing image of what happens even to the proudest fighters after they are slain: they turn into empty specters, grieving the loss of their former selves.<\/p>\n

They behave, in other words, a lot like those poor souls who go through gender transition and regret<\/a> it, wishing they could recover the vitality of their natural bodies. If this is what Nolan has in mind by casting Page as Achilles, assuming he\u2019s actually done so at all, it could serve as a daring commentary on the dark side of this industry.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s also true that Nolan could have made the catastrophic choice of producing a revisionist, anti-heroic Odyssey. We simply don\u2019t know yet, and acting as if we do in advance will undermine even valid criticisms of the movie once it comes out. It will give the impression that lovers of the classics went into theaters determined to hate whatever they saw. Odysseus\u2019s wife Penelope waited 20 years for him to come home. We can wait until July to determine just what Nolan has done with his story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the weekend, a rumor spread online that Achilles, the grand hero of Homer\u2019s Iliad, might be played…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[14442,434,30852,18,94208,1647,117,90306,19,17,210084,30853,18237,5279],"class_list":{"0":"post-480100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-brad-pitt","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-christopher-nolan","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-elliot-page","13":"tag-elon-musk","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-homer","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-lupita-nyongu2019o","19":"tag-the-odyssey","20":"tag-tom-holland","21":"tag-uncategorized"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116559049213249994","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}