Matt Damon Explains What Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Has In Common With Oppenheimer [Exclusive]

Christopher Nolan loves working with the biggest names on the planet, and who can blame him? Outside of Steven Spielberg, there's probably no other director on Earth with the freedom to get whichever stars he wants, whenever he wants. That explains the absolute coup he pulled off with "The Odyssey," packing the blockbuster with as much A-list talent as he could (so-called casting "controversy" notwithstanding). But it's also a two-way street, and there's always the other half of the equation as well.

For instance, what brings performers like leading man Matt Damon back for his third go-around with Nolan after "Interstellar" and, most recently, "Oppenheimer"? It might have something to do with the filmmaker's ability to work with and understand his ensembles, his innate sense of storytelling, and the fact that his movies tend to hit with audiences and critics alike far more often than not. But when Damon first read the script for "The Odyssey," something else stuck out to him — something that brought him right back to his experience on "Oppenheimer."

While attending the New York junket for "The Odyssey," I spoke with Damon about his previous collaborations with Nolan and what similarities he noticed this time around:

"There's so many storylines and so many things that [Nolan] ties together, ['The Odyssey' script is] a beautiful piece of writing. And again, you reread it and you go, 'Oh my gosh, that pays off here.' And it's a little moment, and I missed it because it's in the stage direction. But, he ties everything back together. Which again, it's a massive piece that he's adapting, and I felt that way with 'Oppenheimer' too, which was this Pulitzer Prize-winning, very dense book, and the adaptation I felt like really got the essence of the book."

Of course, it's one thing for an acclaimed writer like Christopher Nolan to take such a massive biography and turn the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a mainstream hit with "Oppenheimer"; it's quite another to accomplish a similar feat with the foundational Greek epic we're all taught about in school. If outside pundits were somewhat skeptical about this and felt Nolan had finally bit off more than he could chew, nobody else could be blamed for feeling the same way — but don't expect any of the cast to admit that.

Another Nolan veteran (one who starred in "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Interstellar"), Anne Hathaway knows better than most to doubt a filmmaker of his caliber. As Odysseus' wife Penelope, her role in "The Odyssey" gives her the opportunity to play one of the most famed characters in all of fiction. But, similar to Matt Damon, all it took was one look at the screenplay to realize that Nolan has once again done the impossible. As she explained to me: 

"Because I was familiar with 'The Odyssey,' I wasn't expecting to find so much new depth to it, but it was [Nolan's] interpretation of it. I kind of wound up almost getting high off the words [laughs]. The more and more we got into filming, I would love this script, and I wasn't just rereading it to learn my lines, I was reading it for the experience of having something of such richness to get to play with."

When is homework the furthest thing from homework? When you have a Christopher Nolan script on your hands, apparently. "The Odyssey" launches into theaters July 17, 2026.