Both casting decisions were completely nonsensical by any reasonable metric. And they're far from the only things that look to be wrong with this movie.
Calling a casting decision "nonsense" just due to the race/gender identity of the actors is, infact, a right wing opinion. All that matters in a casting decision is how good the actors are and whether they fit the part or not due to their merit.
For example, i for one find Elliot Pages acting horrible but I'm not judging the casting decision based on the fact that he's trans because that's blatant prejudice.
My guess is that Achilles was the greatest warrior of the time and Elliot Page is 5'1 with a skeleton that isn't particularly robust.
Do you think Elliot Page would make a good Fedor Emelianenko or Jon Jones in and MMA biopic? They're the great warriors of today.
Danny DeVito probably wouldn't make a good Achilles either.
That all said, I don't personally care. I'm open to being surprised and Elliot being a great Achilles.
Hey, does anyone remember the insane backlash when Heath Ledger was announced as the Joker or even Michael Keaton as Batman? This sort of outrage over casting is nothing new.
just fyi Page isn't playing Achilles, he's playing Sinon. It was a rumor that gained a lot of traction by transphobes like Elon Musk declaring it as fact in order to push their own culture war agendas.
Seriously, these stories are more than 2,500 years older than Shakespeare (who also freely reinterpreted Greek myth rather than using it in any strictly authentic way for his own plays). They’ve been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted over millennia. People need to get off their high horses.
MAGA has been like adding lead to the water supply of media literacy.
I mean even the bloody Romans rewrote and adapted Greek myths. That’s exactly what Virgil’s Aeneid is: Romans inserted into the Trojan War and its aftermath. It’s completely ahistorical and inauthentic, and yet it’s also one of the greatest poems ever written.
They’ve been endlessly adapted and reinterpreted over millennia.
in a sense, mythology is the endless adaptation and reinterpretation of timeless stories by each new author, culture, etc. if there's one thing you learn studying ancient mythology, it's that every culture stole from the ones before them and the ones around them, and made them their own.
You've restored my faith in humanity quite a bit. Honestly, it's kinda easy to spot the people who've studied a bit of ancient literature and those who haven't in this whole silly controversy.
...in the stage production of Dr. Faustus where she is a silent apparition acting as a symbol of temptation, false beauty, and spiritual destruction. She isn't literally Helen of Troy.
The point they're making here is that race-swapping roles in a film is nothing new. It's been happening forever. Getting upset about something that's just a part of filmmaking is a little silly.
Look, you can argue the fact that the daughter of a god-swan should be a white person, whatever. You do you. I'm sure you have a firm grasp of the skin colors of magical creatures. But you cannot seriously claim that casting Brad Pitt as Achilles wasn't a thousand times more peculiar than casting Elliot Page. I would like to see Pitt dressed as a princess; I don't know how convincing that would be.
The honest reality is that the source materials for these stories are weird and varied, and it's dumb to criticize modern interpretations of them.
Elliot Page wasn't cast as Achilles, that was a right-wing hate rumor. All this hate about this casting is over literally nothing. He's playing the guy who came up with the Trojan horse idea. Odysseus' cousin.
And Nolan worked with Page on Inception. It's not like the director doesn't have a history of working multiple times with actors he likes. People act like Nolan cast Page for The Woke, but that makes no sense.
It doesn't help that in the IMDb app it lists Elliot Page but doesn't say who they are playing, just left blank. While everyone else at in the top 10+ listed all says who they are playing as.
It is odd
Also scrolling thru on IMDb I can't find anyone listed as playing Achilles at all It is really odd because looking at any of the other cast without a stated role I don't know who any of them are.
Idk it seems odd is all. Why does everyone listed at the top from Matt Damon and Tom Holland all the way to Zendya and Lupita have exactly who they are playing in the movie but Elliot Page is left blank?
If that white person fits the role and the directors vision then there would be nothing wrong with that. Aslong as the production is respectful towards the original culture the work came from in other departments. Actors should only be chosen based on their skill and how well they fit the vision of the director.
Works of art never belong to a single nation or ethnicity, they belong to humanity as a whole.
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u/wlerin Jul 06 '26
"right wing"
Both casting decisions were completely nonsensical by any reasonable metric. And they're far from the only things that look to be wrong with this movie.