Intro for May 15, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Last week, when the full trailer for Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey dropped, I said “can’t wait to watch all the weird classical art bros lose their minds over a woman of color portraying a Hellenic goddess” in relation to Zendaya potentially, probably, playing the goddess Athena. Well, we’ve got there already and Zendaya didn’t even need to get involved.

This week, Nolan gave an interview to Time magazine in which he confirms that Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy, as previously speculated, as well as Clytemnestra, in a bit of dual casting (they are sisters in mythology). That Lupita Nyong’o, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world, is playing Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships”, predictably sent all the worst people into a racist tailspin, including Elon Musk.

We have over two months until The Odyssey comes out, we still have to get through confirmations of who Zendaya and Himesh Patel are playing, as well as Elliot Page—all the worst people think he’s playing Achilles and are losing their minds over it, though Page’s character remains unconfirmed, too. This is going to be a long summer of Odyssey discourse, so can we all agree right now this is the last we’ll speak of all the worst people being mad that a beautiful Black woman is playing a renowned beauty?

At least conversations about Nolan’s choice to use modern language and American accents centers on choices about storytelling and adapting antique texts for modern audiences. At least that conversation is about how we can interest new generations in stories that are thousands of years old. We can even talk about how Nolan is doing what countless unknown rhapisodes did in antiquity, which is add his own embellishments to a well-known story. This can be an interesting conversation about how stories evolve and the role adaptation plays in that evolution.

But being mad about a Black Helen of Troy is as dumb as being mad about a Black little mermaid. You know what’s not real? Mermaids. You know who else isn’t real? Helen of Troy. In mythology, Helen is the daughter of Zeus and either the goddess Nemesis, or Leda, whom Zeus raped after turning into a goddamn swan. Helen is half swan. Nobody should care what she looks like beyond “beautiful”, because that is all she is required to be for the story.

Certainly, Troy was a real place (located in present day Türkiye), and it did have walls and it was sacked multiple times in antiquity. By the time The Iliad and The Odyssey were written down, the story of Helen and Troy and that ill-fated war was already old, but there might be a tiny grain of truth buried in the telling, that one time, the Greeks sacked Troy. But that’s as far as the truth stretches, by the time of Alexander the Great, Alexander used Troy and Achilles as propaganda to smooth his path as a conqueror.  

So let us agree here and now to never mention this again. The worst people in the world are going to be mad that Christopher Nolan cast a diverse group of actors—which can be seen as another way to modernize/expand the appeal of the story to a bigger audience—and a bunch of dudes are going to pretend like Lupita Nyong’o isn’t gorgeous just to keep the internet outrage machine churning. But we can choose to ignore them. We can starve the internet outrage machine of oxygen. And we should, because this is racist and dumb.

But I also kind of feel like Christopher Nolan knew exactly what he was doing with that interview because now he’s made going to The Odyssey a front line in the culture war, so there will be a performative “I love The Odyssey” moment to combat the internet outrage machine. Manipulated from both sides! The internet was a mistake.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah