Matt Damon Reveals The Wildest Story From ‘The Odyssey’ Set: “There Were 700 Of Them”

Christopher Nolan spent two decades thinking about how he would eventually tackle the Trojan Horse sequence, and once ‘The Odyssey’ finally gave him the chance, he built the moment around a level of scale and secrecy that extended well beyond the finished footage. The director has said he wanted the horse itself to feel genuinely believable to audiences, choosing to show it half buried in sand on a beach rather than wheeled dramatically into frame the way older adaptations typically staged it.

That commitment to authenticity carried straight through to how the actual siege sequence was shot. Rather than relying on visual effects to populate the battle, Nolan filled the scene with hundreds of real extras, staging the moment when Odysseus and his hidden soldiers finally throw open the gates of Troy to let the rest of the Greek army pour through.

Matt Damon, who leads the film as Odysseus, has now revealed just how much of that moment caught him completely off guard in the middle of filming. According to Damon, neither he nor his fellow actors had any idea that 750 soldiers were waiting on the other side of the gates until the moment they actually pushed them open. Speaking about the experience, he explained that the cast had simply been told they were filming the act of opening the door itself, with no indication of what was staged behind it.

Damon described the moment in vivid detail, recalling that in the dim light it initially looked like only Jon Bernthal’s character and a small handful of other men were standing there. Then, without warning, that illusion gave way entirely, and a roar erupted as roughly 500 soldiers came charging forward, catching the actors in a moment of genuine, unscripted shock rather than a rehearsed reaction.

That kind of raw, unfiltered surprise fits squarely into Nolan’s broader approach across the entire production. The director has previously spoken about wanting to capture the claustrophobia and uncertainty of these ancient journeys as authentically as possible, embracing real locations and real physical conditions specifically so the unpredictability of the world could shape how the actors actually responded in the moment.

This is far from the only detail to emerge about how the Trojan Horse sequence came together. CNN previously reported that the production built out the interior of the horse itself for the actors to physically hide inside, with Damon describing the sense of claustrophobia during those scenes as something that developed organically rather than through direct instruction from Nolan. Elliot Page also appears in the sequence as Sinon, the lone Greek left behind to convince the Trojans the horse is a genuine peace offering to the gods.

The scene has already been singled out by critics as one of the most striking set pieces of Nolan’s career, with reviewers describing the sequence as more visceral and grounded than previous cinematic takes on the same myth, largely thanks to choices like filming from inside the horse itself rather than only showing the assault from the outside.

For Damon, that surprise wall of soldiers has clearly stuck with him well past the end of production, becoming one of the most memorable moments of working on the film.

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