STACK #265 November 2026

FEATURE MOVIE

GENRE: Adventure RUN TIME: 2h 52m

The Odyssey marks the third time Anne Hathaway has worked with iconic filmmaker Chris Nolan, and it just keeps getting better and better.

I trusted his experience as a parent to guide me because, right now, my kids are a lot younger, and we are just in a cuddle fest all the time, so we haven’t hit that point yet,” says the actress who, incredibly, stars in three other films this year: The End of Oak Street , The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Verity . The story of The Odyssey has survived for nearly 3,000 years, and for good reason. It is a tale of adventure, courage, temptation, loss, and the powerful pull of home. At its centre is Odysseus, whose journey home after the Trojan War becomes a dangerous odyssey filled with monsters, gods, seductive temptations, and seemingly impossible challenges. But beneath all the spectacle lies something deeply human: a man desperate to return to the wife and son he left behind. For Hathaway’s part, she has been a fan of Greek mythology since her early teens. ”There’s something so powerful about the stories. They’re some of the first ones that our species ever came up with, that have endured as long as they have. ”So, there is something in the DNA of them that just makes sense, so I was just interested in them and dancing with them my entire life. But I never thought it would be

Director Christopher Nolan

FUN FACT

Christopher Nolan shot the entire film on IMAX cameras, burning through 2.1 million feet of film - essentially the distance from Melbourne to Canberra.

Anne Hathaway

”O n The Dark Knight Rises , I worked with him in my 20s. With Interstellar , I was in my 30s, and now with The Odyssey , I’m in my 40s,” says Hathaway, 44, who plays Penelope, wife of Matt Damon’s Odysseus in Nolan’s epic fantasy. ”I feel like I’ve been so influenced by him at every stage. And in this particular moment, since I’m now someone who has a career and a family, and that’s who he’s been the entire time that I’ve known him, I feel like I take even more inspiration from the way he and Emma

by Tom Holland, is all grown up now, but his position as heir to Ithaca is threatened by the suitors vying to marry his mother and steal the throne from him. ”We talked a lot

harmonise their ambition and their lives,” she says of the hit filmmaker, who works exclusively with his co producer wife, Emma Thomas. Pregnant with her third child when STACK talks to her, Hathaway

about that feeling as a parent: the discomfort that comes when you’re not ready, or you don’t feel your child is ready to have the level of independence that they crave, and how that chafes against the love,” says Hathaway, recalling her conversations with the Oscar winning Oppenheimer director. ”And how the force of love

explains how, as a mum, she understood Penelope’s task of ensuring her son Telemachus’ safety during Odysseus’s long absence. An infant when Odysseus left Ithaca for the Trojan War, that son, played

something that I would be able to bring my passion as an actress to, especially not via the vision of Chris Nolan,” she says. ”And this one was so far outside of anything that

makes it worse, because it creates this conflict, this tension point between you and this person that you love so much, and you want them to be independent, but you also want to keep them safe. And Chris’s children are older than mine, so

I ever thought would happen to me that it wasn’t a dream and it wasn’t a wish. It was

Matt Damon

just my own pleasure and something my brain and my imagination loves.” Gill Pringle

• The Odyssey is out Nov 18

IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU’LL LOVE THESE:

Gladiator, Troy, The Death of Robin Hood, Ben-Hur

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