Samantha Morton said Christopher Nolan called her about The Odyssey, and she cried a little when she heard he wanted to meet her. “Really? Me?” she remembered thinking, before the surprise turned into a role she said she fell in love with after reading the script.
The film opened in theaters this weekend, and Morton is now heading to the New York premiere ready for the kind of scrutiny that comes with a big Nolan project. She plays Circe, the figure in Homer’s story who lures Odysseus’s men into eating in her isolated home on Aeaea and then turns them into pigs.
For Morton, the job fits a career built on sharp, unsettling turns. She earned an Oscar nomination for Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown in 2000 and another in 2003, after earlier roles in Jane Eyre and Under the Skin. Since then she has been known for intense, shape-shifting performances in Minority Report, Morvern Callar, Synecdoche, New York and The Whale.
What makes this Circe different is the method. Morton said the pig-transformation scene was done without CGI, with her own hands doing the work “like a magician would,” a nod to the practical, almost theatrical force of the moment. That choice matters because it asks the actor to sell the spell through timing, gesture and eye contact rather than digital spectacle.
Morton’s path to the role also had its own old-school grit. Decades ago, she spent one summer as a magician’s assistant while trying to get her Equity card, and she said that in those days “you needed to work.” The memory feels strangely apt for a scene built on sleight of hand, even if this time the trick is carried by performance, not a prop.
She said she did a deep dive into Circe after getting the part, then quickly pulled back because she did not want to be burdened by it. “I don’t overanalyze,” she said. “I don’t put my characters in psych therapy ever.” That instinct fits the way she described the role: not as a textbook exercise, but as something she had to inhabit and then release.
That may be the most revealing part of Morton’s account. She had not read Homer at school, did not study the classics, and went into the meeting without knowing much about the project. Yet the call from Nolan was enough to startle her, and the script was enough to win her over. At a time when The Odyssey is newly in theaters, the question is no longer whether Morton was the right person to answer that call. It is whether audiences will feel the force of a Circe who works by instinct, not explanation.
