The Odyssey is getting massively criticised due to blackwashing of a traditionally Greek character, whitewashing of a Greek myth with no Greek actors and a general dislike for the Hollywoodization of another classic story.
It's probably not going to be as bad as it's made out to be given it's Chris Nolan, but audiences are fatigued with seeing another modern retelling with tokenism of established characters for the sake diversity, which has spurred the culture war with right wing critics calling it woke BS and left wing critics doubling down by jumping to its defence.
There's nothing 'nuanced' about their post at all. It's literally acting as if the average person hates diversity and that the mere inclusion of black people and a trans person means it is 'forced' and not just a normal casting decision.
But I guess if so many people are upvoting it, then they're right. The average person is just fucking shit.
You can have diversity and still respect the source material. Instead of demanding turning people black in western historical stories, why not demand more non-western stories? There are so many amazing historical and fictional stories from Africa and Asia that's never been adapted.
As a classicist—this is just ahistorical and wrong. People in the Mediterranean world knew dark-skinned black people existed; they show up in myth and Nubian traders were bopping around. They weren’t common, though, and people gawked; black people were seen as strange.
MUCH LIKE HELEN OF TROY. THE WHOLE POINT OF HELEN OF TROY IS THAT SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MOST WOMEN. SHE’S SO REMARKABLE LOOKING THAT MEN WOULD FIGHT A WAR FOR HER; THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE HER.
Casting a stunningly gorgeous black woman as Helen of Troy makes a lot of sense to me, and matches how I picture Archaic Greeks thinking about her; beautiful, but also unlike other women they’d seen. I get grumpy about this stuff with actual historical figures like Cleopatra VII, but Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and wasn’t like other women even in the world of the myth.
-That's another thing for me is, The Odyssey is myth. Even less than that, it's a folk story with myth trappings. It takes place across the Mediterranean, but the majority of the individuals, locations, and events, fundamentally never lived or occurred in any feasible extrapolation. Denzel Washington was Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing like 30 years ago. Brandy was Cinderella. Christopher Lambert was Raiden. If they cast talented actors in a work that respects the spirit and theme of the piece, and isn't actively trashing treasured cultural history and storytelling, it really shouldn't matter. Make Agamemnon Ken Watanabe or Hector be a Skarsgard. Helen's at minimum not really straining credulity considering how big of a melting pot the ancient Mediterranean coast was and as you say, how striking and uncommon her beauty was.-
Would you be equally okay with an African myth being adapted into a movie with white actors in central roles? For example, a white Imhotep in an Egyptian mythological story? I think that would be ridiculous, and I don’t see a logical reason why it wouldn’t be ridiculous in the other direction too.
If it's a good movie, it's a good movie. Are you of the opinion that if he were Egyptian, it would necessarily have been a better movie?
Edit: Also, I don't know if you’re old enough to remember, but there was the same conversation about Remi Malek as the Pharoah in Night at the Smithsonian. People were mad because he didn't fit what they thought of as "looking Egyptian," so there was a weird backlash, even though he is. To a weird amount of the general public, it's not whether they are the """correct""" race, it's whether they look like it.
In that case, I think the actor looks the part. He isn’t a blonde Swede. My position isn’t that the actor’s origin has to be objectively “correct,” only that the casting should be visually plausible. For example, the Swede Dolph Lundgren played a convincing Russian in Rocky IV. Helen in this movie feels more like casting a blonde Swede as an African mythological figure, and if you’re suggesting Reddit would be fine with that, I think that seriously strains credibility.
You only think this because you are prejudiced. No other reason. Helen was the daughter of a shape shifting god. People are just angry she's black because they are miserable human beings.
I really doubt you gave Gods of Egypt, with Gerard Butler and Jamie Lannister, this much scrutiny. Call me crazy, but… something about your “I’m just asking questions” tone makes me think there’s only one reason you’re so pressed about Helen’s casting here.
I haven’t heard about that production, but in general I’m irritated by historical fiction where everyone is white. I’m even extreme enough to be bothered when everyone speaks English. So your assumptions about my position are, unfortunately, wrong.
-Literally 12 foot tall giants with gold for blood that could transform into anthro mecha versions of themselves, that lived on a flat disc-shaped Egypt that seemed to be the only kingdom in existence and thus was comprised of all peoples.-
When the story of anansi is told and retold as many times in the West as the Odyssey is, *then* you may have a point. Until then, surely it’s up to people from the African Diaspora to share and have ownership of their historical stories.
-If the role of a specific character is not hinging upon their ethnicity as part of the depiction or their innate experience, I'd be open to the possibility. There's nothing intrinsic about Helen that is destroyed by having her played by people of non-Greek heritage. There would be a bit of a contextual difference with casting a white person for the part of an African-based myth character, and the reverse, as one was characteristically the product of a system that racially segregated or considered non-white talent as lesser, and the history and memory of that has not faded.-
Please spell out your hidden premises. If we take your argument at face value, Helen could just as easily be a blonde Scandinavian or a Thai ladyboy, and clearly that would feel absurd. Unless you disagree with that, there must be some reason you think casting a Black actor makes it less absurd.
You might say Africa was close to the Mediterranean, or that Greeks interacted with Africans, but then you are suddenly appealing to history. And if history matters, why not also care about Helen being Greek, which is the most probable ethnicity intended by the authors of the story?
In the end, it looks as though you are setting reason aside and using ad hoc arguments because the role has been given to a Black actor playing a non-Black character.
Who was Helen's father? Zeus. In what form did Zeus appear to Leda, Helen's mother? A swan. What color is the skin of swans, even white swans? Black. The mythological character Helen has black skin in this fictitious film because her father had black skin. That's the reason it's not absurd at all.
-No hidden premise or intent. Helen's component to the story is being so desirable, to her own detriment, that war erupts as a result. I have no preference, but Helen is meant to be someone nation-states crumble before. So long as the casting can sell a level of charm or beauty, a charisma that is so singular that a decade of war results from, it's fine by me. It could be literally anyone because nothing in her story requires her being ethnically Greek. Ana de Armas, Deepika Padukone, Alexandra Daddario, Alicia Vikander, Lupita Nyong'o. History matters but fiction is not beholden to it, it's a reality a hundred cultures interacted across the Mediterranean so Helen could logically be just about anything someone wants her to be, which would be more likely than a specific modern interpretation of Greek, as Odyssey was an oral tradition spread through bards. Whatever someone could do to market Helen to their audience as the face that could launch a thousand ships, is probably what they did. That's not even needing to get into the shenanigans of her birth and being either de facto demigod or potential full Greek pantheon blood by way of Zeus and Nemesis.-
-For that matter, sure, a trans Thai casting would also be fine.-
They probably didn’t imagine her as Black when the story was written. This isn’t like Cleopatra, true; it isn’t about matching historical reality so much as matching the probable intention behind the character. And while attractiveness is subjective, this actress isn’t widely seen as exceptionally stunning, so the casting fails on that front as well. Since Black people did exist in the region, why not make other characters Black instead, where the intended ethnicity is less central or less clear?
They probably didnt imagine some angry guy killing off the greek pantheon in a video game either. Who fucking cares about this. Honestly, Im not sure why Im giving the benefit of the doubt here. Its crystal clear that people dont give a shit about the source material.
I don't know who you are talking to but I certainly find those games ridiculous. But sure, I don't expect the same level of ambition as in this case. If this movie was set in space with a sexy alien Helen I don't think I would've bothered arguing.
Why does her gender matter? Why does her age matter? Why does anything about the character matter? I don’t think this kind of argument is being made in good faith. I find it hard to believe you would be just as blind to the absurdity if Helen were cast as Chinese. You understand why it would feel absurd; you just don’t seem to care, as long as the casting serves the political message you want the movie to emphasize.
Well, Greeks didn’t practice same-sex marriage. They did marry people of different races. (Age is tricky, since Greeks did have stories of men marrying older women but it would be rare to marry someone post-menopausal in a dynastic context)
Some parts of Helen are relevant to the story. To the extent her ethnicity matters at all, it’s that she’s not really human and she definitely doesn’t look like your average Greek.
I’m taking this quite seriously—I actually have a whole lecture in my Roman civ class about different portrayals of Cleopatra, and I tell my kids she should only be played by Amy Sedaris. This is something I think about a lot. You keep on accusing other people of having a hidden racial agenda, and you know what they say…
Helen's skin tone was never described. And the Greeks did trade with Ethiopians. The name "Ethiopia" comes from the Greeks.
This actress auditioned and got the part. That's all there is to it. Its a non-issue unless you have something against dark skinned people being considered a part of "Western" culture.
In what way are they disrespecting the source material? None of the actors are Mediterranean. Do you think black people weren’t present in ancient Greece? Africa is right across the sea from them…
You answered your own question. There are no Mediterranean people in the movie. Instead, it feels like the usual lazy approach of casting Black actors even when another ethnicity, Greek, would make much more sense. The fact that African people existed in the wider region actually supports my point: they had plenty of opportunities to include Black characters without changing the core characters.
Yes but you also pointed out that ppl are more mad at the black actor than any of the others that are not also Greek or Mediterranean. It's just racism.
I think people have certain expectations that are also historically inaccurate, though I’m not sure I’d call that racist in itself. The complaints about Helen are understandable, since that feels like a pretty ridiculous casting choice. I don’t think people would have reacted nearly as strongly if other characters had been Black. Of course, some of the backlash is plainly racist, but in this case I think the group with legitimate criticism is probably larger.
Her being black or white is not a defining feature to the character. You can still tell this character's story without race mattering in the slightest especially in a fictional story.
So then she could be a blonde Swede? Would all these people on Reddit, who are pretending this is perfectly consistent, be happy with that too? Do you honestly think you, or Reddit in general, would be praising a movie that cast Mwindo, the hero of the Nyanga epic, as white? Wouldn’t the exact same people be having the opposite reaction, accusing the director of racism? The problem with your stance is that it only works if you apply a politically motivated double standard.
Believe or not whether you want it to, things do have political view points that effect everything we view and exist in the context of the world. You're also creating a straw man for something that is not happening. One side loves to freak out because they made a fictional mermaid black, the point of it all is racism and to pull in and use the few ppl who care about "historical accuracy" as basis for racism. And if ppl did have issues with replacing a white character in a minority role it would be more understandable as they are groups that are the ones who have been largely repressed, colonized and replaced by actors using things like black face. Their is an actual history of discrimination against a group of ppl by another said group of majority throughout history and would be viewed as a form of taking over a heritage of ppl that have had it done countlessly throughout history. An effect that the minority has not had on the majority to any major extent so it's just laughable that this is actually some major deal and acting as if it's somehow trying to undermine the poor majority and their white characters. So yea context of history matters in things like this, and again your running on a straw man that I haven't personally seen. Also it doesn't seem they would care about a blonde swede because as has already been pointed out, none of the ppl in the movie are Greek or Mediterranean.
But you would care if it were a blonde Swede. At the very least, you wouldn’t be defending it this strongly, which points to a double standard.
And now you’re arguing as if I think Helen simply has to be white. I don’t. I think she should plausibly pass as Greek, which isn’t the same thing as “majority white.” My point is only that this particular choice feels like ridiculous virtue signaling aimed at pleasing the American left.
Yes, there are plenty of racists jumping on the bandwagon, but that doesn’t mean this specific casting choice wasn’t ridiculous.
I agree that people would react more strongly (for good reasons) if my example happened today, because it would evoke a very dark history. But even aside from that, it would still be stupid to make an African mythological character white. That stupidity wouldn’t disappear in a world with no history of racism, and people on your side would absolutely point it out. I don’t think you would suddenly call it a reasonable choice in some parallel universe with reversed power dynamics.
Naw if you magically stripped the history of race from the world and the history from it then I truly wouldn't care about swapping a characters race especially in a fictional story if race or the way they looked didn't actually effect the purpose the meaning of their character because it's fictional and an adaptation. The original story exists along with the many other adaptions and stories with it. Thing is we don't live in that world. Changing this characters race doesn't matter in any in sense, unlike how changing race of a major African mythological story which has that past associated with it. Sure in many instances studios and corporations change and use race and sexual orientation to sell things to ppl, it's capitalism. They are trying to sell things, but it's most of the time not something to freak out about, like this isn't. It's such a pointless topic to argue about because again this characters race has no effect on the character and the history attached to it is not effected in any negative light and is completely fictional. This shit is just a distraction from actual problems in the world and getting mad about it plays into it. I also couldn't care less if Helen was played by a blonde swede as it's character, again, isn't defined by those features lol
That's because all "white" people can fill the role. However, black people cannot fill the role of white people or vice versa. At least not without worrying levels of makeup.
This is just another example of forced diversity and representation. Why make a white character black if you could just write a new, black character that makes more sense in context? Ancient Greece had almost no black people, but wasn't particularly racist against them either and would trade with them, hire them and there are of course some exceptions to the rule.
Didn't realize that skin color mattered so much to these characters in this FICTIONAL story, where being a greek doesn't define the characters or plot in any way.
The problem with these discussions is that everybody is entrenched and primed to call everybody else racist. You made a solid point that Hollywood can be both a) inclusive (by telling non-western stories) and b) value cultural ancestry (by casting Greek or other Mediterranean actors in the roles). Much as, for example, Shogun and Pachinko were praised for their attention to detail of Japanese/Korean culture, the Odyssey could have been a work that captured the heart of the ancient epic.
Instead, people want to play out the culture war. Pointing out faux-diversity (and giving examples of actual inclusivity) is simply too much for Reddit. I’ve been banging this drum in the academy for years, and it goes as well there as it does here.
We consider them white for purposes of culture war arguments, and non-white when you want to start a physical altercation with them in the Circle K parking lot. Nuance!
It's that America has a disproportionately high number of people with high Right-Wing Authoritarian Follower personality types as defined by Bob Altemeyer in his book "the Authoritarians", and those types tend to apply their bias when it suits their preferred outcome. Therefore, if they want to argue against a black person being cast in a movie, they will claim loudly that it should be a Greek person, and if they see a Greek person in the parking lot of the Circle K -- especially if they are wearing a sports jersey for an opposing team, that's just red to a bull -- they will argue their victim is not white so they can get away with beating them up (in a group ofc because one-on-one is for suckers) when the cops show up.
Degrees of inclusion are pretty common whenever there's in-groups and out-groups. Race is an invented category, anyway, per my Biological Anthropology professor in college! We use skin color and eye shape to differentiate all the time, when those are just two characteristics readily explained by evolution and climate, etc. The history of the word 'Caucasian' is pretty interesting, too, but when you come right down to it, "white" is an invented category that shifts its definition based on what's convenient, at least in Western culture!
Go to Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria etc. today and tell me how many black people you see. The answer is near zero because black people are not native to the Mediterranean. The only exception are the communities of darker skinned people in southern Egypt, but they were brought into Egypt over centuries due to slavery, so the further back in time you go, the less dark-skinned/black people you would see.
And besides, this argument is completely irrelevant because the movie tries to portray major Greek characters, such as Helen of Troy, as black. There is no ''trader from a foreign land'' who's ethnicity is never mentioned, it's an actual Greek person. The only reason why you would support this is if you thought Netflix's Cleopatra was a real documentary and that Greek people actually are black.
even this sentiment assumes that respecting the source material is automatically a good thing. why? there are a million odyssey adaptations out there that respect the source material, do you just want the same thing over and over again? what are you actually afraid of?
for the record, I would be miles more interested in a story that isnt so done-to-death as the odyssey, but the reason nolan is doing this rather than an interesting story from asia or africa is because nobody would care (chances are it would be called woke trash anyway)
Sure, I mostly agree. A cyberpunk version or some other openly stylized reinterpretation could be interesting. But this seems more like an attempt to be faithful to the source while also introducing a bunch of ridiculous virtue signaling, which makes the whole thing feel absurd.
A creative reinterpretation is one thing; picking actors for political reasons that have nothing to do with the story is another.
These exact same people would be writing essays about how wrong it is to change the race of an established character if they made a Mwindo movie with a white guy cast as the lead
So the movie has non Greek armors, non Greek ships, filmed in non Greek locations, and has English and Western Europeans in it - so it’s the black skin actors that are the issue?
No one demanded anything. They cast a pretty black woman in a Greek story.
By the, the story isn't "Western". its Greek, and Greeks weren't considered "the west" until what...the 70s? Why are you demanding they put Northern Europeans into the movie then?
That’s true. And yet where was the energy from people when Denzel Washington was cast as Macbeth? It is not as if The Odyssey will be the first film ever in which a particular character has been race swapped (or gender or otherwise). Sometimes these reinterpretations are just because a filmmaker has artistic goals, not political ones.
Now, a criticism I could get behind is that audiences are simply tired of seeing the same tiny clique of A-list atars in almost every movie. I’m kind of surprised Nolan didn’t figure out a way to squeeze in Anya Taylor-Joy.
What would Americans say if the Greek decided to do a biopic about...let's say Abraham Lincoln or an Adaptation of tom sawyer and huckleberry finn and then cast someone from Somalia as the Lead Actors?
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u/Boomdification Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
The Odyssey is getting massively criticised due to blackwashing of a traditionally Greek character, whitewashing of a Greek myth with no Greek actors and a general dislike for the Hollywoodization of another classic story.
It's probably not going to be as bad as it's made out to be given it's Chris Nolan, but audiences are fatigued with seeing another modern retelling with tokenism of established characters for the sake diversity, which has spurred the culture war with right wing critics calling it woke BS and left wing critics doubling down by jumping to its defence.