A story broke last week that set the internet quivering with either excitement or indignation, depending on which side of the fence you were on. The rumor was that Lupita Nyong’O (Black Panther, Twelve Years a Slave) was to play Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Curious casting by any measure. A combination of being busy, other outlets covering it in depth, and the fact it was unconfirmed, meant it didn’t get much focus.
All will be confirmed shortly, and then we can jump in, right? Wrong! Several days have passed and, despite all sorts of Reddit threads and AI images, her role has not been officially confirmed in any way.
This hasn’t stopped the usual suspects lining up on both sides.
At first glance, this does seem to be Hollywood up to its usual screenwashing.
Just last week, Latino performers were writing open letters saying only a Latino can portray a Latino on screen. Yet this only seems to go one way.
The shouts for a black James Bond persist, yet nobody would dream of casting Ryan Gosling as the new Shaft.
It also seems far worse when it is a historical figure. Netflix can have a black Anne Boleyn, but imagine the outrage if Barrack Obama was to be portrayed in a biopic by Chris Hemsworth?
It does seem like ol’ Whitey is the only one who can be screenwashed these days.
Helen of Troy’s appearance can be important to this issue.
It is important to understand that there is no evidence that she really existed outside of Homer’s writings. In mythology she was a daughter of Zeus and Leda, hatched from an egg.
There was a Troy, there was a war, but Helen is likely a confection of Homer based upon mythology.
However, central to the story of the origins of the Odyssey is the fact that her beauty and supposedly divine origins were so highly prized that a war uniting much of Greece was waged over her.
The political ramifications for kidnapping the Queen of Sparta, with Greek notions of honor and lineage, would not have happened if she wasn’t one of their own.
Helen was also so prized because she was the text book definition of Greek standards of beauty.
Homer talks of her as fair, with glowing skin, honey-colored hair, and deep blue eyes.
These features were echoed by classical Greek poets such as Euripides and Sappho.
Lupita Nyong’O is a talented actress and comes across really well in interviews, but this casting (if confirmed) definitely raises eyebrows.
You can, however, apply a similar brush across all of these proceedings.
The Greek hero of the story is played by arguably the most famous living Bostonian in the form of Matt Damon.
Jon Berenthal, playing the King of Sparta, is Ashkenazi Jewish and born in Washington DC, before becoming famous for playing Italian Americans.
Telemachus is played by an MCU star from Kingston-Upon-Thames in England.
They may all struggle to tell their gyros from their shawarma without assistance.
So where does screenwashing acceptably start and stop? At what point is it deliberately provocative rather than in service of a story?
There is another potential wrinkle here, too. If Nyong’O is, indeed, to play Helen, then her part in the tale is likely over within the first ten minutes, as The Odyssey is set after the Trojan War.
Like the casting of Travis Scott as a herald, or storyteller at court, is this because even Hollywood wouldn’t dare ethnically screenwash central characters with large amounts of screen time?
So in order to be seen as “diverse enough”, these side roles are cast like this instead.
Isn’t this the absolute worst kind of tokenism, insulting to everyone?
Maybe none of this really matters at all. And maybe Nyong’O Isn’t even Helen and this is all internet-only excitement.
Either way, it feels like a potential minefield and a mess entirely of Hollywood’s own making.
We should probably just point and laugh.
