Every Character Who Dies in ‘The Odyssey,’ and How Christopher Nolan’s Film Rewrites Homer’s Body Count
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster take on Homer’s ancient epic has arrived in theaters, and it turns out the director did not shy away from the poem’s brutal streak. The film follows Matt Damon’s Odysseus through a decade of deadly encounters with mythological creatures, vengeful gods, and treacherous suitors on his journey from Troy to Ithaca, and the death toll is steep on both page and screen.
Fans walking out of ‘The Odyssey‘ are already comparing notes with their old English class reading lists, wondering exactly how faithful Nolan stayed to the source material. The answer is complicated, since the film compresses, reshuffles, and occasionally invents its way through thousands of years of storytelling tradition.
Who Dies in ‘The Odyssey’ Movie
Nolan’s adaptation wastes no time thinning out its ensemble. Odysseus loses every crew member during the brutal ten year voyage from Troy to Ithaca, with several sailors devoured by Bill Irwin’s Cyclops Polyphemus while others die in various battles along the way.
The Troy sequence adds a death that never happens on screen in most adaptations. Elliot Page plays Sinon, a soldier Odysseus tricked into remaining behind at Troy as bait, needed to convince the Trojans to accept the wooden horse inside their walls, after which Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon leads the Greek army through the gates to destroy the city entirely.
The back half of the voyage is just as merciless. Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus defies Odysseus by convincing the starving crew to kill Helios’ sacred cattle, and Poseidon responds with devastating storms that destroy the final ship and drown every remaining sailor. Ryan Hurst’s Mentor and Jovan Adepo’s Elpenor also die before Odysseus washes ashore on Ithaca alone.
The palace massacre closes out the carnage. Matt Damon’s Odysseus slays Robert Pattinson’s Antinous and Corey Hawkins’ Polybus in the suitor massacre, Tom Holland’s Telemachus takes down Logan Marshall-Green’s Melanthius, and Mia Goth’s Melantho faces execution afterward. Even Odysseus himself is not spared a scare, since he suffers severe wounds from several arrows buried deep in his back during the chaos, and Nolan intentionally keeps it unclear whether these injuries ultimately prove fatal for the legendary Greek king.
Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Death Toll Explained
The poem’s massacre in Book 22 is one of the most famous set pieces in Western literature, and it begins the same way the movie’s does. The first suitor to die was Antinous, who had insulted and assaulted with a footstool an elderly beggar who had been Odysseus in disguise.
The manner of that first kill is far more specific in Homer than anything glimpsed in most trailers for ‘The Odyssey.’ Antinous is shot through the throat with an arrow while lifting a golden cup to drink, a death scene that is among the most memorable in the poem, with wine and blood mingling as he crashes to the floor.
From there, Homer keeps the killing going. Odysseus kills the suitors one by one with the help of his son and a few men that recognize him, leaving none of the suitors breathing, though the suitors are all slain except for Medon and Phemius, who are spared, while Melanthius and the unfaithful servants are executed.
Homer’s suitor pool is also simply larger than anything a modern runtime can accommodate. Antinous of Ithaca was one of the 108 suitors of Penelope, and characters like Eurymachus and Amphinomus, among the dozens of suitors, are killed like the rest in the final fight, even though only a handful of named suitors survive in adapted form on screen.
Comparing ‘The Odyssey’ Movie Deaths to the Poem
The biggest structural difference is scope rather than outcome. Homer’s text spreads its violence across an enormous cast of unnamed sailors and over a hundred suitors, while Nolan’s script narrows the carnage down to named, recognizable stars so audiences can actually track who is falling.
The invented Troy prologue is the clearest departure from the source poem. Sinon’s fate as bait for the wooden horse trick is Nolan’s own dramatic shorthand for a backstory that Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ barely dramatizes directly, since the epic itself opens well after Troy has already fallen.
Odysseus surviving his own final battle wounded rather than triumphant and unscathed is another significant swerve. Nolan finds a way to end the ancient story with a fresh plot twist, and that ambiguous, possibly fatal ending for its hero has become one of the most talked about choices in the entire production.
Cast and Character Guide for ‘The Odyssey’
The film leans on an enormous ensemble to carry all of this bloodshed. Nolan’s adaptation stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, king of Ithaca, alongside Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, who tries to keep the peace in her home while fending off a horde of would be suitors with the help of her son Telemachus, played by Tom Holland.
Zendaya rounds out the divine side of the story as the goddess guiding Odysseus through his trials, while Robert Pattinson plays the conniving suitor Antinous, who plots for control of Ithaca in Odysseus’s absence. The supporting roster stretches from Charlize Theron’s Circe to Lupita Nyong’o, giving nearly every major mythological figure a recognizable face.
That star power is part of why the deaths land as hard as they do. Watching a beloved actor get cut down in the suitor massacre carries a different weight than reading a name in translated verse, and that emotional gap is exactly what Nolan seems to be banking on.
Between Homer’s sprawling body count and Nolan’s streamlined, star studded version of the same bloodshed, which telling of Odysseus’s homecoming do you think earns its ending, the poem’s triumphant restoration or the film’s haunting uncertainty about whether its hero even survives.
