Actor Matt Damon came clean about a seriously dramatic weight loss spurt he undertook to play Odysseus in Christopher Nolan‘s epic film The Odyssey – he slimmed down to the weight he had in high school.
In a chat with the New Heights podcast, Damon revealed just how gruelling the process was. “I was pretty fit, I know – I ripped off a lot of weight,” the actor said. “[Nolan] wanted me to be skinny, but also buff.” He admitted that a personal choice to cut gluten from his diet helped a bit, but getting to 76kg while normally weighing between 84 and 91kg took some serious commitment. “It was a huge change,” he said, “I hadn’t been that light since high school – and it took a lot of hard work and a super strict diet.”
That’s a pretty stark contrast to his experience getting into shape for another role: he once deliberately bulked up for The Rainmaker, putting on 14kg. “I just ate like a pig and drank dark beer,” he described the approach at the time, “I used to gorge on really bad fast food & have a snack or 2 in between meals … absolute heaven.”
The film is another take on Homer’s classic heroic poem, a sequel of sorts to the Iliad, which tells the story of Odysseus (or Ulysses, depending on how you translate it ) – he gets stuck on his way home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, and it takes him 10 years to make it back. He gets a lot of grief from Poseidon, the sea god, who’s out to stop him getting home to his wife Penelope.
So far, we know who’s playing the main parts – Matt Damon is on board as Odysseus. According to the Greek press – where a lot of the film was shot – Anne Hathaway’s going to play Penelope, Tom Holland is signed up to play Telemachus, Odysess’ son, and Zendaya’ll be playing the role of Athena, while Charlize Theron will be Circe and so on – Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, Lupita Nyong’o as Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, and a bunch of other A-listers.
The rest of the cast has got some top talent in it too: Robert Pattinson, Jon Bernthal, Mia Goth, John Leguizamo, and loads of others. Nolan’s got some old friends coming back as well – his long-time collaborator composer Ludwig Göransson and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who’s worked with him on loads of films since Interstellar.
The Odyssey – one of the greatest classics of literature – has been rewritten, reinterpreted, translated & adapted so many times it’s lost count. It’s got a lot of “versions” out there – prose versions written by loads of different people, films and TV shows set in ancient Greece and even films that use the narrative structure to tell completely different stories – like the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Well, Christopher Nolan is tackling it as no one else has before: he’s had the biggest budget of his career so far after making Oppenheimer, and the film is being released by Universal – after Oppenheimer did over US$900 million at the box office and won several Oscars, including Best Director & Best Picture.
