“The best experience of my career”: Matt Damon recounts his Odyssey

The actor confides that Christopher Nolan was not afraid to improvise, despite the enormous stakes surrounding this epic production.

After Interstellar And OppenheimerMatt Damon shot for the third time under the direction of Christopher Nolan in his new event film, The Odyssey. This time in the main role, that of Ulysses, the king of Ithaca and hero of the Trojan War who goes through a ten-year journey, strewn with pitfalls, to find his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, played by Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland.

Damon has starred in a bunch of blockbusters, from the saga Jason Bourne to the films Ocean’spassing through Alone on Mars Or We must save Private Ryan. But never in a project of this magnitude. “It’s everything you want from a summer movie. It should be the most massive entertainment. It should be legendary“, he explains in the columns of the new issue ofEmpire which reveals new exclusive images of The Odyssey.

Supporting the words of the director, who displays colossal ambitions with his adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, for which he benefited from a budget of 250 million dollars and filmed in IMAX “more than 600 km of film“, the star ensures the teasing as it should:

“I can say, without hyperbole, that it was the best experience of my career.”

Christopher recounts the Homeric filming of The Odyssey

Universal gave carte blanche to the director, who took the production to the Mediterranean, to the location of the story. A “hard” shoot, with real boats filmed on the open sea, thousands of extras, monumental sets and a life-size Trojan horse that left Matt Damon speechless: “I saw the horse on the beach and I said to myself: damn! It was so cool.“

Despite the enormous stakes surrounding the film, Damon also says that Nolan left some room for improvisation on set. About the so-called horse scene:

“We were going to shoot this scene the following week, so I asked Nolan how he was going to do it. And he said to me: ‘I don’t know, we’ll go there and see.'”

But don’t think that the British filmmaker didn’t have a solid screenplay. By evoking the precision of the script, Matt Damon confirms in passing other key elements of the adventure of Ulysses which we will find in The Odyssey :

“If you have to go through an existential crisis walking past the Sirens while tied to a mast, it’s in there. If it says you’re going to run away from a Cyclops, you’re going to do it. Chris doesn’t hide his game.”

A first teaser of The Odyssey was released in theaters this summer, and a real trailer will be visible in theaters next month for the release ofAvatar: Of Fire and Ashes. The film will be released in France on July 15, 2026.