Samantha Morton on how she cast a spell over ‘The Odyssey’
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.”
