ZEUS’ FLAW

The Real Reason MAGA’s ‘Odyssey’ Meltdown Flopped

The right-wing whiners completely missed the mark, according to the Daily Beast’s chief creative and content officer.

The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles revealed to Obsessed: The Podcast that she usually falls asleep in movie theaters, but The Odyssey’s expert storytelling woke her up after just two minutes of shut-eye.

Coles “thoroughly enjoyed” the film, which has broken box office records, grossing more than $1.3 billion worldwide. Despite its immense success, an onslaught of MAGA hate subsumed The Odyssey even before it hit theaters. And Coles thinks she knows why the backlash fell so flat.

Right-wingers flamed director Christopher Nolan’s casting choices, with Elon Musk, 55, using his X platform to whine about Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o, 43, playing Helen of Troy, whose whiteness Musk apparently views as vital to the story. Though Coles has a few criticisms of her own, she thinks MAGA completely missed the point.

“I actually thought it was sort of genius casting to have Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy,” Coles told host Kevin Fallon. “And actually, what was really shocking were the scars on her face. I thought that was brilliant and utterly plausible—that she seemed so incredibly different from everybody else that they would fall in love with her as this incredibly intriguing woman. What do you do if it’s really the face that ‘launched a thousand ships?’ Who on Earth do you cast for that? You cast a beautiful Black woman, an Oscar winner, to show how different she was from everybody else in the town.”

“Otherwise,” Coles continued, “you’re stuck with having to put in a very, very classically pretty blond girl that will inevitably be an anticlimax.”

But some of The Odyssey’s actors didn’t excel as much as Nyong’o, Cole said. Tom Holland’s Telemachus, for example, lacked the magnetism of other performances.

Coles explained that Spider-Man’s Holland, 30, has yet to play a true romantic lead or feature prominently in a character-driven narrative, and he’ll need to show true emotional range on-screen if he wants to reach the same level of acclaim as peers like Timothée Chalamet, also 30.

Coles is, however, open to “being persuaded that he is the new movie star of his generation,” she said. Or, as Fallon put it, the “next Tom Cruise.”

“Tom Holland, I feel, is perfect for The Lord of the Rings. He should be only ever playing Frodo,” she said. “He’s short, and he’s elfin. He’s, unfortunately, the poor man’s British version of Timothée Chalamet. I mean, he’s got that triangle little face. He should be playing a goblin, directed by Peter Jackson, in the outer shores of New Zealand. He shouldn’t be in the big, sexy summer movie.”

Holland’s inclusion in The Odyssey indicates what Coles sees as the film’s central problem: an excess of stars. Unlike the classicists’ complaints that the adaptation departs from the original text, or the far right’s moans about wokeness, Coles pinpoints the glut of Hollywood elites in each scene as detrimental to the viewing experience.

“I did think it was over-cast,” she said. “It was almost as if they tried to select someone that would appeal to absolutely everybody in every demographic, without the chemistry merging on screen. Leave aside your literary criticism and your textual exegesis. We don’t need that here. It’s like, is it a movie or not? Does it work as a movie? It totally works as a movie. But I did think the cast, the characters, the actors, had no relationship to each other. That’s what I thought was odd.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

Obsessed: The Podcast

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