Before The Odyssey hit theaters, writer-director Christopher Nolan was singing the praises of one specific cast member: Samantha Morton, who has a small but very important role in his film. To the Los Angeles Times, he said her character “comes in and changes the dynamic” and admired how “there are no limitations on her performance.”
He even said his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, compared Morton’s turn to Heath Ledger‘s impactful presence in Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
With the film now open, audiences can now experience Morton’s interpretation of Circe, a witch who famously transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs. In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the star—who genre fans may best know from Minority Report and The Walking Dead—talked about how she approached the role.
She admitted she’d never read the ancient Greek poem by Homer that the movie adapts (though she had seen the Simpsons parody of it). “But the script blew me away, and I was just so moved at how contemporary it felt,” she told THR. “When I got the role, I was just so excited to deliver for Chris and [producer] Emma [Thomas] to inhabit what my instinct was.”
She carried that initial impression of the script into her take on Circe. “I felt that she was incredibly contemporary. I could identify with her. She felt like my sister, my mother, my gran, my aunt, my neighbor. She felt very real and very condensed,” Morton said.
She continued. “I talk about the essential will of Circe. It’s absolutely extraordinary what Chris has done with all of the women in the film. She just feels so whole, so fully realized, yet you’re not there with her for an incredibly long amount of time. In that short timeframe, there’s a lot to achieve, I think. But it doesn’t feel rushed. It doesn’t feel forced. It feels that she’s every woman. She’s all of us. I just really connected with that.”
The Odyssey is in theaters now.
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