Samantha Morton Played Circe Like She’d Met Odysseus Before

There’s an episodic quality to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, which — like the millennia-old source material behind it — sees Odysseus recounting a series of unfortunate events on his journey back home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. While the cyclops and the sirens are reliable crowd-pleasers, few sequences nestle under the skin like the one belonging to Samantha Morton’s Circe. After welcoming the returning soldiers into her remote island home, she reveals her act of hospitality to be a ruse, transforming the men into pigs. It’s an unnerving scene made all the more impressive by its reliance on practical effects, in which Circe molds the men’s faces into more porcine shapes. Later, when Odysseus (Matt Damon) forces her to transform them back, she does so with the haunting refrain, “Back to your disguises.”

It’s not only the wizardry of her transmogrification that has audiences singling out Circe. It’s also Morton’s performance, which shifts between frightened and frightening, all while maintaining a deep sympathy for the character, who sees the ugliness in Odysseus and his men well before the king of Ithaca is able to acknowledge it himself. Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that the film “lived or died” by Circe, calling her “the fulcrum” of his Odyssey. Asked about his assessment, Morton was surprised to hear it, since she’s avoided consuming press about the film. “I don’t read things for mental-health reasons,” she explains. For her part, the actress never imagined that the Circe sequence would turn out to be the breakout moment it’s become, noting that she always reads full scripts and considers projects in their entirety. “It’s not about taking something out as a separate thing, ever,” Morton says. “You’re just part of the web of whatever story is being told.”

You’ve said that you never saw Circe as a villain. How did you contextualize her?
What I did was have a reaction to the script and a reaction to the woman that was written on the page, and think about her as a timeless woman. So in one part of it, I feel she’s like a child or like a young woman, like a 16-year-old girl, and then in another moment, she’s like a 70-year-old woman, and then a 40-year-old, like she’s all ages. I just approached it based on my guttural reaction to the words, the scenes, and then my conversations with Chris [Nolan] about my interpretation of her, really.

When you meet with a filmmaker and you’re talking about it, does that change your perception of a character?
I think in this particular case, it felt very much like an understanding. I felt I understood her. So talking to Chris about my reaction, what I felt, and how I saw her, and then Chris’s feedback, it felt like we were on the same page. I think, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been offered the role after the meeting. Something I said must have worked.

The Odyssey opens with text on the screen about “a time of apparent magic,” so there’s some ambiguity about magic and the presence of gods in the film. Were you thinking about where Circe’s magic comes from?
It wasn’t a concern, because my whole childhood and my whole life, magic, faith, and miracles have been interwoven with every aspect, from books I read as a child to things that have happened to me, to my faith, to magic in the sense of what David Blaine does. When I had my first child — this is a bit heavy, sorry — but when you feel the baby growing inside you, it’s mind-blowing. For me, it didn’t feel like the scene in Alien where you’ve got something in there that doesn’t belong or you’re rejecting it. But the love I felt for this growing baby, and then the baby is born, and this love is so powerful. And then equally, being in the room when my mother passed away — my mother died in my arms. She died of lung cancer. And just seeing the energy in the room of love and her soul leaving the body. I say the word magic, the word miracle, the words love, hope, faith. All these things manifest into something for me, which is a belief in something other that we do not fully comprehend. And it just solidifies more and more for me the older I get that those things do exist.

We get so much backstory in these brief moments. The aside about Circe’s sister being a bird, because they get along better that way. When you’re preparing for a role, are you filling in the blanks or just sticking to what’s on the page?
Initially, the script, for want of a better word, was my bible, my oracle. And then I did have to do a bit of a subtle talking to a friend of mine who studied Greek, just to get a sense of Circe and understand that part. And I found a lot. I bought the Madeline Miller book [2018’s Circe] — that was there. And I was like, you know what, this is all too much. It’s too much noise. So I just was going by the script after putting my toe in the water with some of the backstory, because I needed to have some context, because that would be stupid if I didn’t do that. You know, you need some foundation. But I didn’t overconcern myself with the realities of the foundation, if that makes sense.

With the sister, I’m one of nine. I grew up in a very, very Catholic household. And I did have an older sister that — it was very complex, our relationship. And so that was personal. That was a personal moment.

In most of the iterations of this story, there’s some sort of romantic or at least sexual connection between Circe and Odysseus. Is that something you ever discussed with Christopher Nolan?
I didn’t discuss that with him per se, of holding that to any kind of relevance to that scene. I didn’t want to have that, but what I did do was have the ability to love [Odysseus] in that moment. Because if you are playing somebody who is timeless, what does time do? I was inventing stuff like he’d been there before and he couldn’t remember it. I was inventing all sorts of magical pasts for us, for me and Odysseus, that he couldn’t remember, our love and our time together. That on another plane, in another time, we were together. I just messed around with it a little bit. I think when you see films like Interstellar, or we’re thinking about time travel, and we’re thinking about love, and we’re thinking about, for me, connections between God, life, and death, afterlife, all of these big, big questions, I try to make that scene or that character almost exist in multiple time zones or layers.

On the flip side, you have her interaction with Odysseus’s men, and she invokes their history of raping and pillaging. Is she seeing that real past, or is this her broader perception of what soldiers do?
No, she has seen what’s happened. You know, there are people out there who say they’re psychic, or they sense things before they happen, or they walk into buildings and go, Oh, I don’t like it here, and then someone says, Oh, so-and-so was murdered here in 1976. I don’t doubt that she knows what happened at Troy, but I also don’t doubt that she was terrified when they took her by surprise, because she was so little. She’s able to encompass a young child or an adolescent or an older woman, all of these things. She was very scared as well, the vulnerability of her there.

If you know the story, in that moment, you’re wondering if that’s just a performance because she has the upper hand with her magic. But it seems like there’s a sincere fear as well. The threat of sexual violence is real.
Yeah, 100 percent, and I’m not saying that she’s not being manipulative, but she’s also real in that moment. And sometimes women have to find ways to get out of situations in order to save themselves.

And she obviously has some unique abilities in that sense. The very talked-about moment of her transforming the men into pigs feels like this sudden transition into body horror. 
I didn’t really know that phrase, but I understand it. Growing up, I loved films like The Dark Crystal and An American Werewolf in London and Legend and, oh my goodness, The Hills Have Eyes. I love special-effects magic. I love King Kong, Godzilla. I just love movies, and even down to Jason and the Argonauts or the spectacle of Cleopatra. For me, I didn’t think we were doing that on set. It didn’t feel pointed in that way, but the reality is that it’s pretty scary stuff, what she does. And it felt very much like just the right note.

She didn’t turn them into monsters. She turned them into pigs. The transformation of becoming a pig was tricky, but look at the transformations we go through as human beings — from, you know, being in the womb to being born. It’s just mental. We can’t remember it, but it’s very painful and very complex. And then puberty, or, you know, I’m 49. I’m going to be entering menopause soon, and I’m going to be going through these huge changes. I think that change, both physically and emotionally, as human beings, is something that we all visit. That’s why people have bar mitzvahs or make their first Holy Communion. Going from a child into an adult, there are so many elements of change and growth that we just kind of have to go through, and we call it growing pains because it hurts. And in relation to the practicalities of that scene, it should look like it’s hurting them, because they’re changing. You think about a butterfly into a caterpillar, the chrysalis. Even Cronenberg with The Fly. It didn’t feel like body horror, but the sense of changing is horrific.

Doing it with practical effects versus CGI after the fact, what does that do for your performance?
I talked about loving The Dark Crystal growing up. I loved Jim Henson and practical things and marionettes. And Joe Wright, the director, he grew up in this amazing puppet theater that his parents ran in Islington, in England. He used to take my daughter there as a kid. For me to get the opportunity as an actor to work with practical special effects, having been in The Walking Dead and loving all of that, working with it felt like a massive treat. You become one with them, and that’s what she’s doing, through sound and energy and touch. I wanted to make it sensual as well as violent. I wanted it to be kind of like she was enjoying it, but also punishing them in a way, and I got to do that because I got to touch it, and I think it just elevates the performance. It makes you better because you’re doing it for real, not against an LED screen or a blue screen. It’s a friend to you, if you work with it.

There’s the transformation into pigs, and there’s the transformation back. Circe saying “Back to your disguises” has really stuck with me. I was wondering what that line meant to you.
Well, I didn’t overanalyze it at the time, because you don’t want to busy your mind with fear or with could I be right or wrong? You just have to go in the moment. But on reflection and based on instinct at the time, it was more to do with this sense of the lies we tell ourselves, the truths that we hide. Do we really want to look in the mirror and accept, for some individuals, the pain we’ve caused, whether we meant it or not? It’s sometimes really hard for people to face who they really are, and so they build an image of who they want the world to see or to hide within. And maybe she felt that their true nature was to be a pig.

It would seem like it! It’s so interesting to think of it that way, in the context of a film that’s so much about Odysseus having to confront what happened to Troy and his role in it.
That scene at the end with Athena and Penelope. I mean, Matt Damon is extraordinary in this film, and he’s an extraordinary actor anyway, my favorite. But just how, oh God, it makes me very emotional just thinking about it. The reflection. It’s almost like confession. Being a Catholic, to me, it was like, that’s the ultimate confession to Athena, of facing your behavior, your conduct.

It’s a stunning sequence. I’m curious what your experience was of being able to see the full film, after having just read the script and filmed your scenes.
Initially, very overwhelming, because it’s very emotional and triggers things for me. But I think the film is astonishing. It is absolutely astonishing, and so it very quickly became about just drinking it up, the whole movie, every aspect, from the cinematography, to the sound, to the acting, to the special effects, to the surprises, how they did certain things. And, obviously, being in awe but wanting to go back for more, and again and again. I can’t wait to see it again, just because I feel I must have missed something, because there’s so much to see and feel. And I want that experience again.

Aside from what people have said to you about the Circe sequence, what has surprised you most about the audience reaction to The Odyssey?
I’m not surprised, because I read the script — it’s kind of a confirmation. The reaction from my 18-year-old daughter, who is a very, I would say, modern young woman, and her response to the movie was, she was astonished and she felt very seen. And I thought that was a beautiful thing. Yes, here’s a poster with a warrior and big giants on it, and it’s called The Odyssey, and it’s Christopher Nolan. But yet, an 18-year-old young woman can feel that the film belongs to her just as much as it does to a male audience member. A really beautiful thing.