Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated adaption of The Odyssey doesn’t hit theaters until July, but it is already causing controversy.
Matt Damon is set to play Odysseus in this rendition of Homer’s Ancient Greek epic, but it is the casting of some of his costars in the film that has raised eyebrows. Lupita Nyong’o, a black actress who won an Oscar for her role in 12 Years a Slave, is set to play Helen of Troy – a character who is famously known as the most beautiful woman in the world and described as “white-armed.” Elliot Page, the ‘trans’ actor formerly known as Ellen Page, is rumored to be playing Greek hero Achilles, though that casting has not been confirmed.
The choices are being panned as ‘woke’ and ‘virtue signaling’ from the famed filmmaker behind hits like Oppenheimer, Inception, and The Dark Knight trilogy to name a few. On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Stu Burguiere, host of Predictable with Stu, to discuss the backlash and how it fits into the larger cultural conversation in the U.S. today.
The Controversial Casting
The Academy Awards’ new “diversity rules,” as Megyn described them, mean films must meet two of four “Representation and Inclusion Standards” established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in order to be eligible for Best Picture. They include racial quotas for actors, which, Megyn said, has “led to all sorts of weird and inappropriate casting decisions.”
In her opinion, Nolan is proving himself to be “#PartOfTheProblem” with his choices for The Odyssey. There has been plenty of chatter about Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, but the casting news that really stood out to Megyn and Burguiere was the possibility of Page playing Achilles or some other male character.
Page, who was born female, rose to fame playing the titular character in the 2007 hit Juno about a 16-year-old student who finds herself pregnant and chooses to give the child up for adoption. The actress announced she was ‘transitioning’ in December 2020, changing her name to “Elliot” and undergoing so-called “top surgery” to remove her breasts.
If Page ends up portraying a man in the film and is credited as “Elliot,” Burguiere said “she is already playing a role before the movie begins.”
The Midterm Factor
Amid mounting pressure from Democrats themselves, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) finally released its ‘autopsy’ report about what went wrong for Kamala Harris and co. in the 2024 election. Among the findings? The party’s obsession with social issues (read: “identity politics”) and “a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters” backfired.
On the “identify politics” front, Harris was criticized for “[writing] off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate” and taking for granted that “identity politics will hold male voters of color.”
The autopsy also pointed to President Donald Trump’s attack on Harris’ transgender policies as part of her undoing. The report determined the vice president was “boxed” in by the Trump campaign’s “very effective” viral ad highlighting Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners.
While Megyn said Dems have been “very uncharacteristically smart over the past four months” as they let Trump and Republicans “twist in the wind” over the Iran war and state of the U.S. economy, the fact remains that they still hold the same extreme positions on social issues today.
“Whether it’s Elliot Page in Hollywood… forcing this character on us as… someone who is supposed to be a badass male in folklore or it’s Kamala Harris trying to make us get involved in actually paying for chopping people’s healthy body parts off so they can pretend they are something they’re not, this is why Republicans have still at least a shot in the midterms,” Megyn said.
Window of Opportunity?
As Burguiere noted, history is not on the Republicans’ side in the midterms. “Election after election after election, in a midterm, the party in power, when it comes to the president of the United States, almost always loses seats outside of massively outlier-type situations, like 9/11,” he said. “It is incredibly difficult to do.”
And then there is the current state of the world and economy. “Add on to that that we are looking at $4 and $5 and $6 gas around the country right now. You have a very unpopular situation in Iran… You look at the core of who moved toward Trump in 2024. A lot of those gains happened among Hispanic voters who have been kind of turned off as some of the policies of this particular run for Trump,” Burguiere added. “All that adding up, this should be just cake, frankly, for Democrats.”
Even so, Burguiere said if Dems can’t stay out of their own way and try to revisit clunkers like “defund the police” and “that boy is actually a girl because of a series of magic words we’ve contrived,” he believes there is a way for Republicans to remind Americans what ‘Team Sanity’ is about.
“Redistricting and getting rid of some of these majority-minority districts… is giving the Republicans a chance if they can turn around some of these things that are affecting real people when it comes to the economy, when it comes to gas prices, when it comes to them seeing a vision of a war that might not be ending for years and years and years and years, that type of stuff,” he explained.
“If they could cure that – there’s a small window for it here in the next few months – it could turn that around and put it behind them. People could see things going in the right direction,” Burguiere continued. “There actually is an opportunity here, only because Donald Trump is blessed with the dumbest enemies possible. It is really something he has, and if [Democrats] just continue to do the stupid things that they continue to do, there is an opportunity. There’s a small window. It’s not going to be easy for Republicans, but it does exist.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Burguiere by tuning in to episode 1,322 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.