While MAGA melted down over Christopher Nolan’s casting for his upcoming film, The Odyssey, Matt Damon had a gripe of his own.
Damon, 55, who stars as the film’s titular protagonist, Odysseus, was fixated on a different casting entirely. “Chris is known for being very circumspect. So when you do a take, it’s not like he says, ‘That was great.’ He’ll go, ‘Yep, good. OK,’” Damon, who previously worked with Nolan on Interstellar and Oppenheimer, told Elle for co-star Zendaya’s cover story on Thursday.
“And that is the equivalent of the greatest praise you could ever get.”
Zendaya, 29, who plays Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare, received a different kind of feedback from the terse director.
“There were takes where she did one thing, she did this amazing scene, and he said, ‘Cut.’ And then he went, ‘Perfect,’” Damon, who told 60 Minutes that The Odyssey was the “hardest movie” he’s ever done, added.
The Oscar-winning actor and Zendaya’s own partner, Tom Holland, immediately became “obsessed” with Nolan’s high praise of the Euphoria actress during production.
“She got a ‘perfect’? I’ve never even gotten a ‘great.’ She got a ‘perfect’?” Damon said, mimicking their mutual disbelief. “He and I b---hed about it for the entire rest of the film.”
When Nolan confirmed a different casting this month, that of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, amid lingering speculation that transgender actor Elliot Page may play Achilles, right-wing media insisted that Nolan, 55, was “racist” and that the film would be “historically inaccurate.”
Nyong’o has ignored the noise, telling Elle on Thursday that she was “honored” to play the role and sidestepping the outcry, as has the rest of the cast. Damon, for his part, said he was laser-focused on getting high praise from the director.
The actor said he would ask Holland, 29, who plays Damon’s son in the film, Telemachus, whether he was getting feedback as “perfect” as Zendaya’s.
“Did you get anything today?” Damon said he would ask the Spider-Man actor, to which he’d reply, “No, I got a ‘Good—moving on.’”
Simultaneously with filming The Odyssey in Iceland, Zendaya was filming the polarizing third season of HBO’s Euphoria in California, and the third installment of Dune. Damon was in awe of her ability to switch between projects at breakneck speed.
“It was this amazing ability she had to come in and really put herself in there and blow everybody away, and then just go back to shooting Euphoria,” Damon said. “Look, you forget, she and Tom are very young actors and very accomplished for how young they are, but they’re still in their 20s.”
Zendaya and Holland, who are rumored to be married, got the stamp of approval from their elder co-star.
“I absolutely adore her and Tom together, and they deserve each other—they’re the two loveliest people," he added.
Zendaya, who admitted that returning to Euphoria four years after Season 2 gave her a “weird feeling,” has an enormous slate of projects releasing in 2026, including The Odyssey, The Drama, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Dune: Part Three.
The actress says she’ll likely take a break after such a jam-packed year.
“It’s going to be a long year, but what’s great is that I’m really proud of everything. I just really love my job,” she told Elle. “But I think that after this, I’m going to have to take a little bit of a break,” adding, “As soon as I take a break, I start to go crazy. And I’m like, ‘I need to work.’”
The Odyssey will release on July 17.
