Hollywood Epic’s Black Helen of Troy Shifts US Culture Wars to Ancient Greece

The Odyssey, which consists of 12,110 verses, is not only a story about Odysseus’ return to Ithaca but also a story about the feeling of “nostos” [the Greek word for homecoming] and of humans struggling to find themselves.

The central hero is Odysseus, not Helen of Troy, who appears in only two rhapsodies.

Helen is not a historical person but “a figure of myth, a poetic construction”, explained Plantzos, adding: “That is why every era remakes her”.

“The myth lives precisely because it is translated, distorted and interpreted in the end, and the reason we are talking about it today is this, and not simply because Nolan decided to make a movie,” he said.

Plantzos pointed out that the row over the film’s casting reflects today’s concerns rather than those of ancient Greece.  “The angry demand that Helen be white says more about us, about our current cultural anxieties, than about Homer,” he noted, adding that “Greek antiquity was never pure and nationally homogeneous”.

The myth of Helen was transferred to Greek tragedy by the ancient poet Euripides, who presented her as an idol, and later addressed by Hellenistic literature, painting, opera – and now, by Hollywood. In ancient Greek drama, Helen would have been played by a man, as all women’s roles were at the time.

Yorgos Zois, an award-winning Greek director based in Athens, said that Nolan’s casting represents a typical director’s desire to add their own touches to the adaptation of the story – “doing something that has never been done before”.

Zois is not an admirer of Nolan, and is not interested in Nyong’o’s skin colour but how or whether “she will embody the role with very strong acting that will touch my heart.

“The rest I don’t care about,” he said, explaining that the skin colour argument mainly concerns extremists “who believe in the purity of the roles of the white race”.