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How do you bring the ancient world’s most famous epic to the modern screen, almost 2,800 years after it was created? If you’re Academy Award winning film-maker Christopher Nolan, you assemble arguably the most exciting ensemble cast in recent history. This summer’s highly anticipated cinematic event, The Odyssey, brings together a collection of Hollywood powerhouses – from Oscar-winning veterans to era-defining young talent – for this mythical, action-epic, a story of one-eyed monsters, gods, sweeping landscapes and a hero who just wants to get home.

Matt Damon
As Odysseus, the warrior king of Ithaca who won an unwinnable war and now, relatably, just wants to go home to be reunited with his wife and son, Matt Damon is doing what he does best. The Oscar-winning actor has become the go-to lead for blockbusters about heroic but human men trying to get back to their own beds: from space in Interstellar and The Martian, to bomb-building in Oppenheimer.

For Damon, though, nothing has come close to The Odyssey. “I said yes before Chris even told me what it was,” Damon says. “I feel like my whole life was leading up to this movie. It’s the biggest I have ever done in terms of scale. Definitely the biggest in terms of its ambition.”

Anne Hathaway
To play Penelope, wife of Odysseus and Queen of Ithaca, Nolan turned to another trusted collaborator, Oscar winner Anne Hathaway. Since her first Nolan role, as cat burglar Selina Kyle in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, she has taken home an Oscar for Les Misérables and continues to reign supreme in 2026.

A self-confessed Greek mythology geek, the chance to give Penelope complexity and a simmering, potent rage was impossible to resist. “Penelope had so much fire and passion,” says Hathaway. “I appreciated that Chris brought in the possibility that Penelope felt misunderstood, and that that is part of the bond she shares with Odysseus. I also thought it was wonderful that Chris really attended to the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope.”

Tom Holland
While many of the cast have worked with Nolan on multiple occasions, Tom Holland has finally ticked it off his bucket list after years of hearing about life on a Nolan set from Spider-Man stunt coordinator George Cottle.

He plays Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, and there are surprising similarities between him and Peter Parker: both are young men on coming-of-age journeys, reckoning with protecting their home.

Despite cutting his teeth in the all-encompassing Marvel Cinematic Universe, this was next level. “I remember my first day in Morocco – the scope and scale were really overwhelming,” says Holland. “The IMAX® cameras almost take you back to square one as an actor.”

Zendaya
Cast as Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare, is an actor who has never failed to be the most compelling thing in any frame, or on any red carpet.

The irony is that Emmy-winning Zendaya never saw the role coming. “I remember when Tom got his call, and I was over the moon,” she says of partner Holland. “So when he came home and said: ‘Chris wants to talk to you about something,’ I said: ‘Wait – what?!’ It was like I had won the lottery.”

Zendaya found her way into Athena by focusing on her human qualities and her connection to Odysseus. “I really connected with the emotional component of it,” she says. “I found it very human and very emotional.”

Robert Pattinson
Consider Robert Pattinson partly responsible for Nolan’s award-winning Oppenheimer, after gifting him a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches while filming Tenet in 2020. So it stands to reason that Nolan would want him back.

Having most recently starred opposite Zendaya in The Drama, here he plays Antinous: an anti-Odysseus, one of many scheming to marry Penelope and kill Telemachus.

His reading of this antagonist is as unexpected as you’d expect from Pattinson. “Antinous represents a kind of modernity that’s without ethics,” he says. “I wanted him to be glamorous in this quite primitive environment. He is very peacock-y.”

Christopher Nolan
Nolan’s 13th major motion picture fulfils a dream of many years to film an entire movie using IMAX® cameras, and it represents his most immersive and expansive cinematic experience yet. He brings it to the screen, at a scale and with a level of artistic ambition never achieved before.

Since Memento in 2000, Nolan has been redefining what a Hollywood blockbuster can be. In The Dark Knight, superheroes became complex. Inception made audiences question everything around them. Dunkirk stripped war back to its terrifying essentials. And then Oppenheimer swept the 2024 Academy Awards.

So who else, after more than two millennia of waiting, could do justice to the immensity of The Odyssey?

“I was intrigued by the idea of a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories,” he says. “With a top-level budget, a top-level cast, and pouring all the techniques and resources of a massive Hollywood production into this world.”

The Odyssey, in cinemas Friday 17 July. Book tickets now