In the myth of the Odyssey, Circe is a witch who lives on the island of Aeaea. On their journey home, Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men stop at an island hoping to find food. Zeus’ law was that people in those days showed hospitality to visitors, as any hungry person who came to their door could be a god in disguise. Circe is feeding the soldiers, but it is clear that the food has included men. Circe then turns the men into pigs.
When Odysseus finds them, he finds out what Circe has done and demands that she turn them into men. Circe tells the men to “return to your disguise” and turns the pigs into men. In Homer’s poem, Circe and Odysseus actually become lovers and he lives on the island for a year. She gives Odysseus two sons.
Aside from the most disturbing sequence in the Odyssey, why was Circe’s role so important to the movie?
Circe shows another side of Zeus’ law. What happens to people who show hospitality to others? Penelope played 300 suitors, and they devoured her outside and at home while threatening her son. She had to stay behind a closed door because men could not be trusted to behave properly, so her safety required that. Sirce didn’t have a cage to hide in, so he used magic to protect himself.
Circle is played by two-time Academy Award-nominated actress Samantha Morton, who you can see as Agatha from Minority Report (2002), Sarah Sullivan in America (2002), or Alpha, the leader of the Whisperers in The Walking Dead. Morton told VARIETY that she drew on her personal experience to prepare for the role: “My family is a military family… War is complicated. Men are complicated. Our relationships with men as wives, sisters, and daughters are complicated. I drew from that. And there are people in my family who have been sexually assaulted and raped, and I thought about that.”
After Homer wrote the Odyssey, the Greeks later added to the myth of Circe, making her responsible for one of the monsters that Odysseus’ crew encounters later in the movie. At one point men were forced to choose between two terrible fates: a giant whirlpool called Charybdis or a six-headed, twelve-legged sea monster called Scylla. The latter was once a beautiful seabird but Circe poisoned her and turned her into a monster because she was jealous that Glaucus, the god of the Sea, loved her.
The expression “caught between Scylla and Charybdis” is still used today and refers to these two ancient horrors and means the same thing “between a rock and a hard place.”
Circe’s role is important, because she begins to open Odysseus’ mind that although his men are heroes and winners in battle, not everyone sees them that way. Circe sees these men as a threat, like real pigs who come to her house to steal and rape. As Odysseus later finds out, he is not the only one with this idea. The people all along the coast are afraid of the “people from the sea” which Odysseus finally understands is referring to himself and his men.
Ranking all the performances in The Odyssey, VARIETY ranked Samantha Mortan as Circe as the best performance in the entire film. They said: “The clear MVP of Christopher Nolan’s epic is Morton, whose pig-transforming sequence as the witch Circe is nothing short of extraordinary. Morton has always been a sensational screen presence and it’s on full display here, as Nolan and the two-time Oscar nominee turn the witch into a tyrant who is tormented by Odessesse. The rage of women.”
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