Nolan's 'Odyssey' Trailer Ignites Accent Debate as 3,000-Year-Old Epic Gets American Voices
Updated
Updated · Vox.com · Jul 16
Nolan's 'Odyssey' Trailer Ignites Accent Debate as 3,000-Year-Old Epic Gets American Voices
3 articles · Updated · Vox.com · Jul 16
Summary
Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson and Matt Damon all use contemporary American accents in the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” prompting online jokes and backlash over a Boston-sounding Odysseus.
Nolan has said he wanted an “earthy narrative” shaped by Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, favoring language with emotional immediacy over the elevated diction long associated with Homer on screen.
Dialect coaches cited in the report say the reaction reflects a Hollywood convention in which British accents became shorthand for period authority and imperial power, even in stories set in ancient Greece, Rome or space.
That convention may be weakening: with the British Empire fading from living memory, the trailer suggests younger audiences are confronting a shift in what power sounds like in a classical epic.