Tom Holland Roasted Anne Hathaway Over Her VIP Treatment On ‘The Odyssey’ Set, And Fans Are Living For It

Shooting an ancient Greek epic across some of the most rugged filming locations in recent memory was never going to be easy, and Christopher Nolan’s cast has spent much of the press tour trading stories about just how grueling it actually was. Between mountain hikes, rope systems through forests, and cave shoots that took hours just to reach, ‘The Odyssey‘ has clearly earned its reputation as one of Nolan’s most physically demanding productions.

Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway sat down together for an Extra interview promoting the film, and the conversation quickly turned into a lighthearted callout session. What started as a discussion about the challenges of filming on location became a moment fans have latched onto ever since it started circulating online.

The core of it came down to a simple contrast. While Holland described trekking up and down mountains every single day just to reach set, Hathaway revealed she had been offered an entirely different mode of transportation altogether.

Hathaway explained that Penelope’s elaborate queen costume would have taken longer to reassemble after a sweaty hike than it was worth, since she did not have armor to sweat into like some of her castmates. She told Extra that she was offered a helicopter ride to set, and admitted she kept quiet about it whenever anyone complained about the walk down afterward.

That helicopter reveal has fueled the exact kind of good-natured ribbing fans love seeing between co-stars, especially given how candid both actors have been about the production’s difficulty elsewhere. Hathaway has described how Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas started offering small prizes, like electronics, to whoever made it up the mountain the fastest, turning the daily trek into its own competition among crew and cast.

Holland has been just as vocal about the shoot’s intensity in separate interviews, recalling one trip to visit the Cyclops cave set that took hours of walking from town, up a mountain, and through a rope system built by the crew just to reach the location. He has said the experience left him in awe of the scale Nolan was working with, even as a young actor with nothing to do but watch.

Hathaway, who previously worked with Nolan on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ and ‘Interstellar,’ has said this production still managed to intimidate her despite her history with the director, joking that it scared her regardless of what she thought she already knew about his sets.

The mismatch between Hathaway’s helicopter commute and everyone else’s mountain trek has become a small but telling detail about just how physically demanding ‘The Odyssey’ turned out to be for its cast, and how differently that difficulty was distributed depending on costume and character. It is the kind of behind-the-scenes anecdote that tends to stick with fans long after a press tour wraps.

With the film’s IMAX shoot already being described as one of Nolan’s most technically ambitious efforts yet, stories like this one are giving audiences a clearer picture of just how much the cast endured to bring ‘The Odyssey’ to the screen. The film opens in theaters on July 17.

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