Tom Holland Says Watching This ‘The Odyssey’ Scene Made Him Realize He Was Witnessing Movie History

Tom Holland has spent years working across some of the biggest productions in the world, but even by his own standards, ‘The Odyssey’ seems to have left a different kind of impression on him. The actor, who plays Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s sweeping adaptation of Homer’s epic, has been vocal throughout the film’s press cycle about just how singular the entire experience felt compared to anything else on his resume.

That reputation for scale is not just marketing talk. Production designer Ruth De Jong built out colossal, physical sets for the film, with the reconstructed city of Troy singled out by critics as one of the production’s most visually staggering achievements, all filmed on location at Aït Benhaddou near Morocco’s Atlas Mountains.

According to Holland, though, the moment that truly made the scale of the production sink in for him did not even happen on a day he was scheduled to work. Holland has described visiting the set purely as an observer during the filming of the Siege of Troy sequence, a decision that ended up giving him a front row seat to a moment he now describes as history in the making. He called the sequence absolutely breathtaking, adding that watching it unfold felt like witnessing the game itself being changed in real time.

Holland has said the scale of what he saw that day was unlike anything he had personally witnessed before, pointing to the sheer size of the battlefield, the presence of the towering Trojan Horse, practical fire effects, and hundreds of background performers all working in tandem.

At the center of it all was Matt Damon as Odysseus, and Holland has said he was especially struck by how the production’s use of miniatures blended seamlessly into the real, practical locations, making a physical set only a few hundred meters wide feel like it stretched on for miles.

That kind of forced perspective trickery, making a comparatively compact physical build feel like it extends for something closer to seven miles, speaks to just how deliberately Nolan and his production team engineered the sense of scale audiences see on screen. For Holland, the experience of watching that illusion come together in person became what he has called the ultimate pinch yourself moment of the entire production.

This is far from the only time Holland has gushed about his experience working on the film. Speaking to GQ, he described the entire shoot as the job of a lifetime without a doubt, calling it the best experience he has had on any film set and praising Nolan’s collaborative process alongside producer Emma Thomas as something he had never encountered before in his career.

Holland has also praised the script itself in separate interviews, telling AFP that it stands as the best screenplay he has ever read, while noting that Nolan still leaves genuine room for actors to pitch ideas and shape their characters despite having a clear vision for the story. Combined with his account of watching the Siege of Troy unfold from the sidelines, it paints a picture of an actor who walked away from the production feeling like he had witnessed something rare, even by blockbuster filmmaking standards.

With ‘The Odyssey’ now playing in theaters worldwide, audiences finally get to judge for themselves whether the finished sequence lives up to the awe Holland described feeling on set.

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