Samantha Morton doesn’t have a lot of screen time in “The Odyssey,” but when she shows up about halfway through the action epic, she commandeers the film. In an electrifying sequence that lasts roughly 10 minutes, Morton delivers a searing, richly textured performance as Circe, a sorcerer who transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs. In Homer’s epic, Circe is a beautiful temptress who toys with the soldiers for pleasure. In Morton’s hands, she’s a woman who has seen too much brutality and uses her magic as a safeguard against sexual violence.
“My family is a military family,” Morton says. “War is complicated. Men are complicated. Our relationships with men as wives, sisters, daughters are complicated. I drew on that. And there are people in my family that have been sexually assaulted and raped, and I thought of that as well.”
Performing the scene made her “take a good long look at the behavior of mankind and men in particular.”
When Christopher Nolan asked if she would meet about his next project, Morton couldn’t believe her luck.
“When I got the call, I started to cry,” Morton remembers. “Then we had a get to know you chat, and I read the script. But I didn’t know if it would go any further. So when he called and said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ I was blown away. He could have anybody on the planet, and he chose me.”
