Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings Homer's epic to the screen — the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras — with Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus. This page maps the film's cast of characters as a family tree, the way a genogram maps any family: marriages, bloodlines, loyalties, and enmities.
It is deliberately spoiler-free. Every relationship shown is as Homer gives it — nothing here reveals what the film does with the story. Each character's notes carry who plays them and where they stand in the poem, so you can walk in knowing the map and none of the turns.
The family web runs deeper than Ithaca. Lupita Nyong'o plays a dual role as two sisters: Helen of Troy, whose flight with Paris launched the war, and Clytemnestra, who murdered her returning husband Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) — and in myth both are first cousins of Penelope herself. Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, Helen's husband, completes the Spartan branch that the poem holds up as a mirror to the house of Odysseus: three marriages, three very different homecomings.
Around the family stand the poem's immortals and monsters — Zendaya as the goddess Athena, Odysseus's divine patron; Samantha Morton as the enchantress Circe; Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso; Bill Irwin as the Cyclops Polyphemus — and the household the king left behind: Robert Pattinson as the suitor Antinous, John Leguizamo as the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, and Mia Goth as the disloyal maid Melantho. For the full mythological bloodline, from the thief-grandfather Autolycus to the strange fate of Telegonus, see the House of Odysseus tree.
Open & edit this family tree →