Jac Caglianone homered and drove in five runs on a three-hit night, Michael Massey also homered and had three hits and the Kansas City Royals beat the Angels 7-6 on Friday to snap a four-game losing streak.
John Schreiber, Nate Pearson and Steven Cruz threw scoreless relief innings for the Royals, with Cruz finishing for his fourth save.
Nolan Schanuel had two hits and four RBIs for the Angels (48-75). They had won three straight.
After Josh Lowe’s solo homer off Alex Lange (2-7) gave the Angels a 6-5 lead in the sixth, Kansas City (50-73) scored twice off Tayler Saucedo (0-1) in the seventh to make it 7-6.
Caglianone is batting .438 (21 for 48) with five homers and 18 RBIs during a 12-game hitting streak. In the ninth, he took second on an error and scored on Massey’s two-out RBI single to finish the scoring.
Caglianone’s two-run homer — his 22nd of the season — off left-hander Sammy Peralta gave Kansas City a 5-4 lead in the fifth.
Royals starter Seth Lugo gave up five runs and seven hits in 4⅔ innings.
Up next: Royals RHP Randy Dobnak (2-1, 2.00 ERA) was set to oppose Angels LHP Reid Detmers (3-8, 4.00 ERA) on Saturday night.
MIAMI — Mike Trout and Nolan Schanuel hit home runs for the Angels in a 4-3 win over the Marlins on Friday, sending Miami to its fourth consecutive loss.
Trout homered in the first inning to open the scoring. Trout, who turned 35 on Friday, hit a home run on his birthday for the sixth time in his 16 MLB seasons.
Josh Lowe scored when Trout reached on a fielder error by Josh Ekness and Schanuel hit a two-run shot to center field, his second home run in as many games, in the seventh.
Shaun Anderson (2-0) recorded the final out of the sixth and earned the win. He walked one and gave up one hit.
Owen Caissie walked to lead off the fourth, Jakub Marsee singled and Esteury Ruiz walked before Kyle Stowers drew a bases-loaded walk to drive in Caissie.
Stowers added an RBI single in the sixth.
In the ninth inning, with two outs, Leo Jiménez hit an RBI single to center field to score Agustín Ramírez and make it 4-3. Javier Sanoja hit the ball off the glove of third baseman Denzer Guzman and left fielder Jose Siri’s throw home beat Jiménez to end the game. Replay review confirmed the out.
José Fermin pitched the ninth and earned his first career save. He allowed one run and three hits.
Ekness (0-1) pitched 1⅔ innings and allowed three runs.
Up next: RHP Sandy Alcantara (12-6, 3.68 ERA) starts for the Marlins on Saturday against the Angels’ RHP Walbert Urena (7-7, 2.54).
Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” published in 2017 served as inspiration to Christopher Nolan when crafting his blockbuster adaptation of the nearly 2,800-year-old poem, has some thoughts on the film.
In a biting missive for the London Review of Books, the British American classicist dissected Nolan’s work with a scalpel so sharp that he may need to borrow some of Matt Damon’s armor to read it all the way through. Last fall, the acclaimed director quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said. “The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me. He’s not just a soldier. He’s an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”
Wilson, although admittedly “humbled” by the nod from the filmmaker, wrote: “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
A professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad.” In her takedown of the film, she likens Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones” and says that, by the end, she “almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”
Earlier this month, The Times’ film critic, Amy Nicholson, wrote that “Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to serve his own needs, scrapping the character’s prickly personality to Trojan-horse a message about how empires collapse. … Aghast at the ways of men, he’s dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate the tale into a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.”
Wilson appears to share the sentiment.
“Unlike some of Nolan’s other films,” she wrote, “‘The Odyssey’ is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”
When casting was announced for the film, it was no surprise that culture wars broke out over the choice of Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy, with Elon Musk leading the charge.
Nolan responded, telling the Telegraph earlier this month before the film hit theaters, “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”
According to Wilson, Nolan’s race-neutral casting had “nothing progressive about it.”
“Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” she wrote.
Wilson zeroes in on the portrayal of Homer’s female characters in another major critique: “There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the [characterizations] in the poem.”
Where Charlize Theron’s Calypso ought to have been angry, funny, skilled in rhetoric and libidinous, according to Wilson, she’s “an unpaid therapist.” On Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, Wilson writes that the script “gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown.” And Zendaya’s Athena “turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience — not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess.”
And then there’s the human cost of war — the central theme of the film, and one that Wilson says contradicts Homer’s poem.
“The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world,” she writes. “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it — a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar — but Nolan doesn’t.
“The film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing.”
Since Nolan announced “The Odyssey” back in December 2024, various versions of the poem have been in high demand at bookshops and libraries — especially the only English version written by a woman: Wilson’s 2017 translation. Louise Brockett, spokeswoman and head of communications at W.W. Norton, told USA Today that domestic sales of Wilson’s translation surpassed a million copies this year.
Concluding her critique of Nolan’s “Odyssey,” Wilson says the release of the movie is “still an event to celebrate.”
“In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities,’ translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.”
Nolan spent $250 million making “The Odyssey,” and on opening weekend the film brought in a total of $264.1 million worldwide, according to studio estimates.
Samantha Morton didn’t mean to start humming during that scene in “The Odyssey,” the scene everyone is talking about, when, as the sorceress Circe, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, literally molding them into their true savage selves.
It wasn’t in the script. It just happened. And when Morton was done, she looked over to director Christopher Nolan, waiting for him to say something like, “Maybe try it without the humming, Samantha.”
But Nolan didn’t say anything, so Morton did it again and the music that was swirling inside her head, which she remembers now as a symphony of glass harmoniums and theremin, kept coming out as Circe went about her witchy business, altering her gluttonous guests, who are busy slurping and gulping down her stew.
“These are sounds that can make you go mad, apparently,” Morton, 49, tells me, reclining on her bed at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. “So to transform the men, the magic came not just from my hands but from my sounds.”
Samantha Morton as Circe in “The Odyssey,” directed by Christopher Nolan.
(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)
Morton unabashedly believes in magic. How else, she asks, can you explain how a girl who was shuttled between children’s homes and a dozen foster families, only to be living on the streets of Nottingham, England, at the age of 14 with a criminal record, be here talking with me now, sipping green tea at the Chelsea?
“That’s got to be guardian angels and love — and not that I suddenly became good at acting and got a job,” says Morton, a veteran who’s been at it for 35 years, dazzling audiences and stealing scenes for the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jim Sheridan and, now, Nolan. “I’ve always believed that anything is possible and there’s no doubt in here,” and she pats her heart, “because I’ve always felt this immense love for me from another entity.”
When Morton heard that Nolan wanted to meet her for “The Odyssey,” she says she wept. If that sounds dramatic, she makes no apologies. She likens it to being an athlete who qualifies to represent their country at the Olympics. She’d spent decades honing her craft for that phone call. When it came, she flew to Los Angeles in January 2025 during the wildfires, embarking on what would become the best job interview of her life.
I ask her what she remembers about that meeting.
“I think it went really well,” Morton answers, laughing.
Morton told Nolan she hadn’t read “The Odyssey,” which, when you quit school at the age of 12, makes sense. Flying back home to England — she and her husband live in East Sussex with their children, 18-year-old daughter Edie and 12-year-old son Teddy — she recalled that, yes, she knew a bit of “The Odyssey” from having seen it parodied on an episode of “The Simpsons.” (“We’re ‘Simpsons’ mad in our house,” she says. “Like, mad.”)
But Morton doesn’t believe in bogging herself down in research, not since starring in a British TV production of “Jane Eyre” when she was 19 and carried around a heavily highlighted copy of the Charlotte Brontë book, despairing whenever the adaptation deviated from the novel. From that point on, she stuck to the script and her own imagination.
“That’s got to be guardian angels and love — and not that I suddenly became good at acting and got a job,” says Morton of her career. “I’ve always believed that anything is possible.”
(Ebru Yildiz / For The Times)
Thinking about Circe, Morton recalled going to the library with her dad (“We had nothing and were beyond poor, but he always had a library card,” she says) and finding the Howard Pyle fairy-tale book “King Stork.” She remembers being mesmerized by the story’s wicked witch. She recalls other witches from folk tales like Baba Yaga, frightening characters but also, she says, “women possessing an innocence that had been eroded over the years by the harshness of life.”
Morton does a playful verbal evasion when discussing the nuts-and-bolts aspects of shooting the scene where Circe transforms Odysseus’ men, saying that back in the day when behind-the-scenes features were prevalent on DVDs, she routinely declined to participate.
“I didn’t mean to be tricky, but it was like: This is my private moment. This is for me,” she says. “I do like the idea of a little mystery.”
But then a beat later, she laughs it off and dives in, remembering that her husband showed her an Instagram post from Nolan’s set revealing how the movie’s Cyclops was, in fact, a puppet.
“Oh my gosh — I love puppets!” Morton raves, and off she goes, telling me how much she adores Jim Henson and how “The Dark Crystal” is one of her all-time favorite films.
What she will say about her “Odyssey” scene is that there were no digital effects. Everything was real and “in camera” and that she was so in the zone that she barely remembers any of it, only flashes.
“That’s not CGI,” Morton says. “That’s human brilliance and a connectivity of me as a performer, almost dancing and feeling one. And not to say that it was sexual, but I wanted it to be very sensual when she’s with the men and the animals, just like, you know, that she’s almost one with them.”
“What was lovely about that,” Morton begins and then stops, wondering if she should draw back the curtain on the creative process. She goes ahead. “There was a day on set when Chris was like, ‘OK,’ and he put his hand in because I was a little scared. It’s like that scene in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ where he puts his hand in the thing, and you’re like, ‘Oh no!’ I was a little nervous, but Chris did it first. I think he actually cut his finger.” She giggles. “You know, he’s going to go in first, like getting into the cold water in the sea. I felt protected and supported in that whole process.”
When Odysseus’ men arrive at Circe’s home, hungry, asking to be fed, Circe seems frightened — understandably so. She’s alone, and these soldiers have a history of pillaging and taking what they want. And yet, she’s a powerful sorceress. Is Circe really scared or tricking them to lure them in?
“I played that like she was genuinely frightened because she was caught off-guard,” Morton says. “I also wanted to play somebody that was all ages, so I played her like a 16-year-old girl in that scene. And then in other scenes, I’m playing her as a 90-year-old woman or a 49-year-old woman or a sister or a mother, a grandmother. I just wanted her to be ageless.”
Morton, looking out for Circe, stresses that transforming Odysseus’ men was not purely vengeful.
“It’s not just hate,” she says. “It’s not just harm. It’s not just anger. It’s almost like a Zen master within the goddess role of the teaching as well. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ gluttony, greed, all of these things.”
There’s a righteous feminist rage underneath the scene as well, a modernization that brings “The Odyssey” fiercely and disturbingly up to date. It’s another reason why people leave are leaving the theater talking about Morton.
“In some weird way, the film lived or died over that character,” says director Nolan of Morton’s Circe, a creation of pure acting and no digital sorcery. “She was the fulcrum.”
(Ebru Yildiz / For The Times)
Nolan thinks “The Odyssey,” in some weird way, “lived or died over that character — she was the fulcrum.” He told The Times that “after one of her takes, the crew gave her a great round of applause.” Emma Thomas, Nolan’s producing partner and wife, later recalled that the last time that had happened was with Heath Ledger on “The Dark Knight.”
Morton makes a point of telling me how much Ledger meant to her, having been cast opposite him (and Odysseus himself, Matt Damon) more than 20 years ago in Terry Gilliam‘s 2005 fantasy adventure “The Brothers Grimm.” Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein overruled Gilliam, dropping Morton from the film because, in his eyes, she wasn’t attractive enough.
“And Heath fought for me with such kindness and compassion,” Morton says. “He’s up there with Philip Seymour Hoffman for me. There’s something otherworldly personal about what they gave, such sincerity and vulnerability and an absolute dedication to craft. They leave a mark on your heart.”
It’s not the first time Morton has invoked the heart in our conversation. She brought her son, Teddy, to New York for the premiere of “The Odyssey” because she wanted to show him the place where her creative spirit was born. Morton first came to New York as a teen to do press for “Emma,” returned a year later to promote “Jane Eyre” and then couldn’t bring herself to leave, “sofa-surfing” at friends’ apartments so she could immerse herself in the city.
“New York stole my heart,” Morton says. It’s where she first got into literature, devouring Charles Bukowski, roaming the aisles at the St. Mark’s Bookshop, checking out movies from Kim’s Video and gobbling hash browns and eggs over easy at the Waverly Diner.
Not long after, Morton scored the role that would land her the first of two Oscar nominations (for now, at least), playing the mute laundress in Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown.” The production put her up in a Greenwich Village apartment and when it ended, she moved to the East Village.
Only the diner remains but Morton still plans on touring the Village with Teddy, showing off all of mom’s old haunts and, yes, having a cup of soup at the Waverly.
“Life is good right now,” Morton says, smiling. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll indulge in some hash browns.”
