On the basis that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Odyssey, is having a second helping of great notoriety this week. It comes courtesy of an admission from actress Lupita Nyong’o, who conceded that until she was cast to play Helen of Troy, she had never heard of Homer’s great tale of gods and men.In an interview for a fawning profile in Elle magazine, Nyong’o said, “I really had no idea what The Odyssey was. I was like, ‘Oh snap, I don’t know the first thing about this.’” Although she had performed a few monologues from Greek mythology when she was at Yale drama school, Nyong’o was “unfamiliar with the source material.”To which the obvious response is, how could someone get into an MA program at Yale while entirely ignorant of the 2,800-year-old epic, a foundational text and one of the cardinal works of classical literature? There was a time when Yale would reject any applicant who could not read, construe, and parse works in Greek and Latin; now it lets in students whose minds the existence of those works has never intruded.
Social media debate over this and other matters about The Odyssey will doubtless help at the box office when the film is released on July 17. But this is not, as noted, the first controversy about the movie, nor even the first one centered on Nyong’o.
