Elliot Page Steals ‘Odyssey’ In Few Scenes, And It’s His First Major Studio Film Since 2017

Elliot Page is on the screen for only a few pictures, but Elliot Page plays one soul in Christopher Nolan’s war epic who refuses to give up his honor. It is the role that pulls the entire film into focus.

Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you haven’t seen “The Odyssey” yet.

Page, 39, plays Sinon, a Greek soldier who does not appear at all in Homer. Nolan took the character out of Virgil in “The Aeneid” and built him into the moral center of the film, what many critics have called the “soul of wonder” of the film.

Sinoni dies soon. Abandoned by Trojan soldiers on the beach, he tells them that the giant wooden horse outside their city is a gift from Athena, unaware that Odysseus and his men are hiding inside to sack Troy. The officials drag the horse through the gates and place it near the Temple of Athena, and the city falls hours later.

He comes back as a ghost. When Odysseus reaches the underworld, Sinon stands up with black dirt and blood on her face and mourns the betrayal that turned her words into massacre. Odysseus refutes the lies of those who won the war. Sinoni replies that it does not comfort him while wandering among the dead. Reviewers singled out the Hades sequence as the film’s most troubling stretch, with Page’s performance described as beautiful and “taken from Hades himself.”

It’s also a quiet coup. Sinon first reads like a mindless boy soldier destined to die, and Page turns him into a conscience the whole epic spirals back, the face Odysseus can’t look at from the afterlife.

“You’re looking to put a face to some of the things that Odysseus did, what that means to the world,” Nolan told Rolling Stone UK. “You are looking to put a face to this tragedy of war, and I think so [Page] You did a great job.”

The casting drew a wave of transphobic backlash online upon release, fueled by rumors that Page was playing Achilles. The original role, and the updates that are now reaching it, have made most of that noise look ridiculous.

It’s Page’s first major studio film since 2017’s “Flatliners.” He broke out at age 18 in “Hard Candy,” won an Oscar for “Juno” in 2007, and spent two decades bouncing between indies like “Whip It” and “Tallulah” and blockbusters like Nolan’s “Inception” and the “X-Men” films. Since coming out as a trans man in late 2020, he has worked extensively as a producer and as Viktor on Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy.”

“The Odyssey” is in theaters now.

Thanks for reading Thought Catalog. Join us on Facebook, or keep reading on our website.