Odyssey star Samantha Morton opened up about experiencing homelessness as a teenager.
Morton, who has received widespread acclaim for her performance as the sorceress Circe in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey, revealed that her father was in and out of prison during her childhood. She told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that she would alternate between living with him and living with foster families.
At age nine, Morton became a “ward of the court,” she said, which means “the government owned you.”
“You’re not cute anymore, and you know you can’t get a foster family at that point for a long period,” Morton said. “So then at about 14 I started running away and living on the streets. And then at 16, I was in a homeless hostel, and that was when I wrote my first play.”
Over time, plays led to on-screen work. In The Odyssey, Morton’s Circe lures Odysseus’ starving men into her cozy cottage with the promise of food, only to turn them into pigs. Critics have lauded Morton’s performance for its complex depictions of female rage, which resonate in a contemporary audience even while taking place in an ancient text.
Variety called her portrayal of Circe “extraordinary.”
When Morton was growing up, the movie theater provided an escape from the outside world’s strife—she and one of her sisters would sneak into the movies and stay as long as they could, often watching the same movie over and over.
“I used to run away from children’s homes with my big sister Penny, and we would sneak in the back door of the ABC cinema in Nottingham and hide there all day,” she recalled. “The outside world was pretty gruesome, and so that was our safe space.
“I would hide behind the big velvet curtains and roll down like a roly-poly down the little bank at the front,” she added.
“So my entire childhood was sneaking into the cinema because I couldn’t afford it to escape what was going on in the real world. Yeah. Or just, you know, wanting to get to the cinema.”
