The Odyssey: Lupita Nyong’o is a Master of Dual Roles

This article contains spoilers for The Odyssey.

The Odyssey just opened on Thursday night, but that’s already enough time to completely disregard the dumbest criticism heading into the film. Some observers had complained about director Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the woman whose coupling with the prince Paris “launched a thousand ships,” in Christopher Marlowe’s words, and started the Trojan War.

Obviously, these were always bad faith takes, more about the fact that Christopher Nolan would cast a Black woman as a character they assumed was white (despite the fact that actual scholars show that such distinctions were irrelevant to the Greeks). Moreover, these criticisms completely ignore the fact that, in addition to being a cosmopolitan polyglot, Nyong’o is also an Academy Award-winning actress and an international model. Perhaps most importantly of all, the role actually calls for two performances, as Nyong’o plays both Helen and her sister Clytemnestra. And if there’s one thing that Nyong’o does well, it’s play two identical characters, especially if they’re scary.

Twice as Important

We meet Nyong’o’s character midway through The Odyssey, when Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Tom Holland) visits the Spartan king Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), who fought with Odysseus (Matt Damon) in the Trojan War. Telemachus hopes that Menelaus knows where his father has been, but instead learns more about Odysseus’ brilliant tactic of constructing the Trojan Horse. At the same time, Telamachus meets Menelaus’ wife Helen, who glares at her husband through her scarred face, belying her servile position.

The information proves just as useful to viewers as it does to Telemachus. Through Menelaus, we learn the full legend of the Horse, and of the soldiers’ esteem for Odysseyus. But through Helen, we learn about how others suffer because of soldiers’ decisions. The Greek king Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) sacrificed Iphigenia, the daughter he had with Helen’s sister Clytemnestra, to the goddess Artemis. Clytemnestra greeted Agamemnon and celebrated his return from the Trojan War. But then she murdered her husband in revenge, and was eventually killed by she and Agamemnon’s son, Orestes.

In Homer’s text, Agemmonon reveals his fate to Odysseyus from the afterlife, a plot point repeated in Nolan’s film. Further, the film tells the viewer about the sacrifice of Iphigenia relatively early, and there too foregrounds Agamemnon’s perspective. These two decisions prioritize Agamemnon, framing his decision to sacrifice his daughter as something necessary, if not noble, to win the war. Agamemnon emphasizes his own suffering when telling Odysseus about Clytemnestra’s revenge, which sets up the hero’s decision to disguise himself when he returns to Ithaca.

However, the decision to place Helen’s telling of Clytemnestra’s story in the middle prevents us from fully sympathizing with Agamemnon, and sets up the themes that Nolan will develop in the movie’s final hour. For that, he needed an actor capable of playing two women, equal in beauty and ferociousness. For that, he needed Lupita Nyong’o.

Twice as Terrifying

At the end of the first act of Jordan Peele’s Us, the wild-eyed Red spins a yarn to her captors, the Thomas family. She tells about a little girl who came with her parents to a seaside carnival, only to get lost in a house of horrors. There she met her double, who locked her in the tunnels under the carnival and escaped to the world. The double went on to have a perfect life, complete with a loving husband and two perfect kids. Trapped in the labyrinth, the girl experienced only pain and suffering, forced to live with brutal, imperfect grotesques of the double’s family.

So powerful is Red’s story that it forces the audience to forget the inconsistent logistics of Us‘ world and overwhelms viewers with its thematic resonance and emotional power. Red, the lost girl, and Adelaide, the double who took her place, are both played by Nyong’o, who fully embodies the latter’s terror at losing what she loves and the former’s anger at a life stolen from her. Through her performance, we understand the point that Jordan Peele wants to make about the inability of class distinctions to separate people and the impossibility of looking away from the suffering of the lower classes.

That weighty material comes through in the way Nyong’o plays Red and Adelaide during the aforementioned confrontation. As Red, Nyong’o squeezes her words through a shattered windpipe, as if the simple of act speaking took great labor. As Adelaide, Nyong’o remains wary and tense—scared about what might happen to her family, for certain, but also more aware about who Red and these doppelgängers are than her family realizes.

With the way she twists her body to play Red and the way she holds her head to play Adelaide, Nyong’o communicates to the audience both the profound connection and stark differences between these two women. She conveys entire themes with just the slightest gestures. Which makes her the ideal person for Nolan’s take on Homer’s epic.

Twice As Powerful

Like most Nolan stories, The Odyssey is about a man who feels immense guilt over the way his actions have separated from his family. But it’s also about the cost of seeking power, a theme present in the director’s work since Inception and The Dark Knight, and most pronounced in Oppenheimer. While he explicitly lays out those themes when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, recounts to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) about his violation of Zeus’s law and murder of Athena’s priestess (Zendaya), he sets it up with the story of Helen and Clytemnestra.

The rage of Clytemnestra appears in flashback. It’s only through other people’s stories that we see her pushing against soldiers to rescue Iphigenia, and later attacking Agamemnon. Her rage and her anguish exist in the past, mitigated by other people’s narratives, turned into a character in their stories.

But that’s not the case with Helen. When Helen turns toward Telemachus to glare at him past Menelaus, her gaze burning all the brighter because of the scars around her eyes, her anger is present and real and cannot be dismissed by her husband’s tales of glory to his young, adoring guest. In that stare, Odysseus isn’t just some brilliant adventurer. He’s a brute.

Helen only gets a few minutes of screen time, and most of that is spent standing quietly as the trophy for Menelaus she is. For that reason, she needed to make her words and her rage count, because she wasn’t just speaking for herself—she was speaking for her sister and, by extension, all the casualties of war. Thus, Nolan needed an actor who wasn’t just beautiful and talented and could carry herself like a queen. He needed a first-class actor who excels in dual roles, which is exactly what he got with Lupita Nyong’o.

The Odyssey is now playing in theaters worldwide.