By Elisa McAtee, Graduate Student in Classics
The figure of Helen in Greek mythology has always been controversial. Ancient writers displayed their intellectual prowess debating whether she really went to Troy, or not, and the attention to Helen’s famously beautiful appearance problematizes the dangers of erotic desire, tensions between appearance and reality, and anxieties surrounding female sexuality. In an inadvertent and jarring echo of the classical past, Helen was perhaps the most controversial figure in Christopher Nolan’s recent Odyssey adaptation as well. This is due to his casting of Lupita Nyong’o for the character, which sparked a great deal of racist commentary.
Yet, like many other female characters in Nolan’s Odyssey, Helen’s role is sharply reduced from the source text. The trailers for the film falsely magnified her role; she appears only for a moment. When Telemachus initially encounters Helen, he, and the viewer, can see only one side of her face. Menelaus gleefully quips that she has “the face that launched a thousand ships…now maybe just five hundred!” and yanks her head around; we discover that she is permanently scarred. Helen betrays no reaction, as if this is not the first time Menelaus has said this. In Homer’s Odyssey, Helen and Menelaus appear to be a functional couple; in Nolan’s version, it’s heavily implied that Menelaus abused Helen upon retaking her from Troy, blaming her for the war. Helen also implores Telemachus to apologize to Penelope for everything she has caused. It is clear Helen’s personhood was an excuse for the men around her to continue the war, and she passively suffers its consequences.
In contrast, the Homeric Helen we see in Book 4 of the Odyssey, in which Telemachus crashes a wedding feast at Helen and Menelaus’ palace, is a subversive figure, befitting the debates surrounding her. Helen is the first to recognize Telemachus as Odysseus’ son, and she reveals that she was gifted highly potent drugs from Egypt, which she gives to her dinner party to soothe the pain of remembering the Trojan War and induce forgetfulness. In addition to having magical capabilities, she is also described as clever and cunning. Helen is the only person able to see through one of Odysseus’ disguises, and she is also able to imitate effectively the voices of the Greek warriors’ wives, as she tries to lure them out of the Trojan Horse. Despite attempting to aid the Trojans, Helen also expresses remorse for her part in the war, regretting leaving Menelaus and her homeland. Her affinity with witchcraft and personal agency aligns her with other powerful and magical women in the narrative, such as Circe and Calypso.
What to make of Nolan’s Helen, relative to the trickier character we see in Homer, and why might she have been flattened? In an interview with TIME, Nolan noted that he felt the Odyssey didn’t sufficiently address how Helen’s return to Menelaus and their relationship would work; he couldn’t see their marriage being anything but hateful (despite Helen’s magical, amnesia-inducing mystery drugs). For Nolan, Helen’s disfiguration not only symbolizes their tumultuous relationship, but also acts as “a shorthand way to communicate the aftermath of the war and how it’s been traumatic for the entire world.” That is, just as the ancient Helen acts as a symbol of beauty and human sexuality, Nolan’s Helen is a powerful symbol for the pervasive psychic malady of war, and the casual misogyny of the men around her, who treat her like a trophy – at the cost of her individual personhood. I would be remiss without mentioning how Nolan’s casting of Nyong’o became a symbol in its own right, of pop culture conflicts and of the practice of colorblind casting generally. Interestingly, in an interview on The Tonight Show, Nyong’o stated that Nolan essentially wrote the role for her, as she was “the only person he had in mind” to cast as Helen. One wonders if Nolan intended to create the controversy around Nyong’o’s casting all along – which I find disturbing knowing the amount of vitriol to which she was unjustly subjected.
In contrast, although the Homeric Helen is ultimately at the mercy of the men around her, we are presented with some episodes in which she takes control for herself regardless. Some of Helen’s other ancient portrayals also maintain the agency of the character, ironically more so than Nolan. For instance, Sappho’s 16th fragment gives us a Helen who has willingly chosen to leave her children and husband behind for Paris in the aesthetic pursuit of beauty; Euripides’ tragicomedy Helen provides us with a different rendition of the character entirely, offering us an explanation for Helen’s strong ties to Egypt in the Odyssey. In this adaptation, Helen never went to Troy at all and was instead replaced by a magical phantom, an eidolon, while she has spent the duration of the war in Egypt. Euripides’ Helen is a resourceful and devoted woman who plots an escape from a forced marriage with Egypt’s king, Theoclymenus, and is assisted by the kindly yet bumbling Menelaus, who washes ashore from a shipwreck. Nolan’s choices mark the latest intervention in a series of long-lasting discussions surrounding this character.
Further Reading and Viewing:
Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Destruction (Oxford, 2013).
Eliana Dockterman, “Christopher Nolan on Helen, Athena, and His New Ending for The Odyssey.” TIME, 24th July 2026, https://time.com/article/2026/07/24/christopher-nolan-explains-the-end-of-the-odyssey/.
“Lupita Nyong’o Co-Directed with Christopher Nolan for Her Scenes in The Odyssey (Extended).” YouTube, uploaded by The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, 16th July 2026, https://youtu.be/ZdAI02mFsRw?si=Jq7-4Xhs6Mhwh8-T.
