Published: 09:50 AM, 09 July 2026
Matt Damon calls 'The Odyssey' the most challenging film
Matt Damon has played action hero Jason Bourne, an astronaut stranded on Mars and dozens of other characters, but it was his role as the Greek king Odysseus that he said presented his biggest on-screen challenge.
Director Christopher Nolan insisted on practical effects and real-world scale over digital shortcuts for his telling of "The Odyssey," which will debut in theaters on Jul 17. The nearly three-hour movie from Universal Pictures, the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras, adapts one of the oldest surviving stories in human history.
"This is how a movie would have been made 80 years ago," Damon said. "Everything's in-camera. You know, if you see a thousand people, then there are a thousand people there. The ships, those are real ships in the background.”
Nolan's "Odyssey" was shot in six countries, including Morocco, Greece and Iceland. Damon and fellow cast members worked through extreme weather conditions with high winds and pounding rain that battered them on ships out in the open ocean.
"It was without question the hardest film, the most challenging, that I've ever done," he said.
"The Odyssey," the epic poem, dates back in written form to around the seventh or eighth century BC and is widely believed to have been sung before that in oral tradition. The story centers on Odysseus as he tries to get home after devising the strategy that won the Greeks the Trojan War.
On his voyage across the seas, Odysseus encounters witches, monsters and gods before finally getting back to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland).
