Elliot Page walked the red carpet for The Odyssey in New York City earlier this week, then watched the conversation around the film swing from opening-night buzz to online abuse. He attended the premiere with his girlfriend, Julia Shiplett, and was joined by Peppermint, James Tom and Chase Strangio.
The leak at the center of the backlash showed Page’s character, Sinon, dehydrated and scrambling across a beach. That was enough for some commenters to jump to the wrong conclusion and write as if he had been cast as Achilles, even though the role was confirmed in late June as Sinon, not the Greek warrior they were angrily invoking.
That confusion is what gave the reaction its charge. In May, the rumor was that Page would play Achilles in the Christopher Nolan adaptation, and Elon Musk amplified objections while Rob Finnerty mocked the casting by calling Achilles the “most famous warrior in all of history.” Once the real role was confirmed, the complaints did not stop; they simply shifted shape, with one commenter asking how “the fuck” the film hurt Achilles and another writing, “How ANYONE could pay to watch this is beyond me.”
The footage itself appears to have done more than show a man in distress. It gave viewers a few seconds that looked stripped of context, and that was enough for bad-faith readings to harden into a pile-on. Sinon is not Achilles. He is the trickster from Virgil’s Aeneid who persuades the Trojan army to bring in the wooden horse, and the online reaction shows how quickly a mythological role can be flattened into a target when a clip leaks before a film opens.
The bigger test is whether the noise can dent the movie’s first weekend. Projections still put The Odyssey on track for a $200 million global opening, which suggests the film’s broader draw is doing far more work than the controversy around Page’s casting. If the box office holds, the backlash will read as a loud but temporary flare-up; if it does not, the leak will be remembered as the moment the conversation around the film stopped being about the epic and started being about the clip.
