Samantha Morton defends Circe, as Emily Wilson tears apart The Odyssey’s female characters

Before Emily Wilson‘s blistering critique of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey landed this week, one of the film’s stars had already been explaining why she believed one of its most divisive female characters deserved far more sympathy than audiences might expect.

Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey was praised by Nolan while he was making the film, criticised the blockbuster for reducing its women to little more than plot devices.

“Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object,” she wrote in the London Review of Books. “I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters.”

She also argued that Lupita Nyong’o’s dual performance as Helen and Clytemnestra was underused.

“Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).”

Wilson added that although Nolan included more women than in many of his previous films, they still weren’t given enough depth.

“There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem.”

But Samantha Morton, who plays the enchantress Circe, has spoken about taking a very different approach to the character than audiences might expect from Homer’s original version.

Although Circe only appears for around 10 minutes in the film, Morton’s performance has become one of the standout moments. Rather than portraying the sorceress as a seductive villain who turns Odysseus’ crew into pigs for fun, Morton said she viewed Circe as an ordinary woman trying to survive in an incredibly violent world.

Speaking to Variety, she explained that her interpretation was shaped by personal experiences and the impact war has had on her own family.

“My family is a military family,” Morton said. “War is complicated. Men are complicated. Our relationships with men as wives, sisters, daughters are complicated. I drew on that.”

She continued: “And there are people in my family that have been sexually assaulted and r*ped, and I thought of that as well.”

Instead of leaning into Circe as a classic femme fatale, Morton framed her magic as a form of self-defence against the threat of male violence, turning one of Greek mythology’s most infamous witches into something much closer to an everywoman protecting herself.

Her comments have taken on even more significance after Wilson’s criticism of the film’s female characters, with the two offering very different perspectives on whether Nolan’s adaptation gave its women enough depth.

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Featured image credit: Universal, Matt Baron/BEI/Shutterstock