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The information that Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” will be played by Lupita Nyong’o caused a flood of reactions from celebrities, such as Elon Musk, who rushed to question Nolan’s integrity, as well as from anonymous commentators. This is not unprecedented.[Evan Agostini\/Invision\/AP]<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to remember another movie that caused so much speculation and talk months before its release, as Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d has done, even though its not coming out until July 17.<\/p>\n
In this part of the world especially \u2013 since a significant part of the big-budget epic production was filmed in Greece \u2013 even the smallest tidbit of news about the film immediately piques the public\u2019s interest. The most recent such tidbit was a leak \u2013 not an official announcement \u2013 that Lupita Nyong\u2019o will be playing Helen, beside Matt Damon\u2019s Odysseus. More precisely, the rumor stems from a social media post, accompanied by an edited photo of Nyong\u2019o, in which she appears dressed in an outfit that seemingly alludes to an ancient Greek chiton.<\/p>\n
Although the image is not genuine, there is some truth to the post, since the Oscar-winning actress (\u201c12 Years a Slave\u201d) is part of the cast and may portray that specific character. But are we ready for a Black Helen of Troy? One person who clearly isn\u2019t is Elon Musk, who quickly commented on the news, saying that Nolan has \u201clost his integrity.\u201d Needless to say, reactions across the Greek online sphere were far more numerous and markedly more critical, echoing what we saw some time ago when Netflix released a miniseries starring a Black Queen Cleopatra.<\/p>\n
Homer described Helen of Troy \u2013 and Sparta \u2013 as having beautiful hair (kallikomos), a beautiful face (kallipareios), an elegant style of dress (tanypeplos) and white arms (leukolenos). She is also a fictional rather than historical figure, set to appear in Nolan\u2019s equally fictional film. The latter also features the goddess Athena, portrayed by the African American actress Zendaya \u2013 another mythological \u201cdistortion,\u201d according to those who object to departures from traditional imagery.<\/p>\n
The fact is that Helen, as a symbol, represents such extraordinary beauty that an entire bloody war was waged for her sake. The undeniably stunning Nyong\u2019o amply meets that criteria. What\u2019s more, she wouldn\u2019t even be the first Black woman to do so. Back in 1950, the great Orson Welles cast the African American actress Eartha Kitt as Helen of Troy in the play \u201cTime Runs,\u201d which he presented in Paris.<\/p>\n
That said, this doesn\u2019t mean that anyone who objects to this particular version of Helen is necessarily biased or racist. It may simply come down to aesthetics or to the mental image someone formed, perhaps from a very young age, when first meeting the characters of Homer\u2019s epics. At the same time, we must respect the creative choices of an accomplished artist like Nolan. After all, when we\u2019re talking about cinema and fiction, there\u2019s really no reason to stick to convention \u2013 unless one believes that the familiar film portrayal of Jesus as a blond, blue-eyed Northern European is historically accurate as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The information that Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” will be played by Lupita Nyong’o caused a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,2331,134,1689,1721,6213],"class_list":{"0":"post-463436","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-opinion","15":"tag-society"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}