A woman with dark hair holds her clasped hands to her lips near a fire, with two armored men blurred in the background.
The Odyssey (2026)
TV + Movies

Why I’m Officially Team Circe After Seeing The Odyssey

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In the myth of The Odyssey, Circe is a witch who lives on the island of Aeaea. On their journey home, Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men stop on the island hoping to find food. Zeus’s law required people in those days to give hospitality to guests, as any hungry person who shows up at their door could be a god in disguise. Circe feeds the soldiers, but it becomes clear the food has put the men under a spell. Circe then transforms the men into pigs.

Many people are singing the praises of Samantha Morton as Circe in The Odyssey.

When Odysseus finds them, he figures out what Circe has done and demands she transforms them back into men. Circe tells the men “back to your disguises” and turns the pigs back into men. In Homer’s poem, Circe and Odysseus actually become lovers and he stays on the island for a year. She gives Odysseus two sons.

A worried woman in dark robes holds clasped hands to her mouth, with armored men blurred in the background and firelight to her right.
A woman in dark, rough-spun clothing clasps her hands to her lips with an anxious expression, flanked by armored soldiers in a dimly lit, firelit scene from The Odyssey (2026).

Besides being one of the most disturbing sequences in The Odyssey, why was Circe’s role so important to the movie?

Circe shows the other side of Zeus’s law. What happens to the people who extend hospitality to others? Penelope played host to 300 suitors, and they were eating her out of house and home while terrorizing her son. She had to stay behind a caged door because the men could not be trusted to behave themselves, so her safety required it. Circe didn’t have a cage to hide in, so she used sorcery to protect herself.

A bearded man armed with a bow and quiver leans over a rough wooden fence, facing a dark-haired figure, with bodies lying in the foreground.
Odysseus arrives at Circe’s cottage in The Odyssey.

Circle is played by the two-time Academy Award nominated actress Samantha Morton, who you may recognize as Agatha from Minority Report (2002), Sarah Sullivan in In America (2002), or Alpha, leader of the Whisperers in The Walking Dead. Morton told VARIETY that she drew on personal experience in preparing for the role: “My family is a military family… War is complicated. Men are complicated. Our relationships with men as wives, sisters, daughters are complicated. I drew on that. And there are people in my family that have been sexually assaulted and raped, and I thought of that as well.”

Samantha Morton at the New York premiere of The Odyssey at AMC Lincoln Square Theater
Samantha Morton at the New York premiere of The Odyssey.

After Homer wrote The Odyssey, later Greeks added to the mythology of Circe, making her responsible for one of the monsters Odysseus’s crew meets later in the movie. At one point the men are forced to choose between two horrible fates: a massive whirlpool called Charybdis or a six-headed, twelve-legged sea monster named Scylla. The latter was once a beautiful sea nymph but Circe poisoned her and turned her into a monster because she was jealous that Glaucus, god of the Sea, loved her.

Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo, Tom Holland, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong'o, and Zendaya at The Odyssey premiere in New York City
The main cast of The Odyssey.

The idiom “caught between Scylla and Charybdis” is still used today and refers to these two ancient terrors and means the same thing as “between a rock and a hard place.”

The role Circe plays is important, because she begins opening Odysseus’s mind up to the fact that even though his men are heroes and victors in the war, not everyone sees them that way. Circe sees the men as a threat, as literal pigs who come to her home to steal and rape. As Odysseus finds out later on, she isn’t the only one with this view. People all over the coast are afraid of “the people from the sea” which Odysseus finally understands refers to him and his men.

Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong'o, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, and Samantha Morton at the New York premiere of The Odyssey
Samantha Morton and the women of The Odyssey.

In a ranking of every performance in The Odyssey, VARIETY ranked Samantha Mortan as Circe as the best performance in the whole film. They said: “The clear MVP of Christopher Nolan’s epic is Morton, whose pig-transforming sequence as the sorceress Circe is nothing short of extraordinary. Morton has always had an enthralling screen presence and it’s on full display here, as Nolan and the two-time Oscar nominee have turned this witch from a weak-willed goddess who’s seduced and bedded by Odysseus into the embodiment of female rage.”

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