The Indian Actor Playing A Major Role In Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

Now that Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is almost at our doorsteps, British-Indian actor Himesh Patel has become one of the most discussed names attached to the epic. His casting has opened a debate that runs through ancient history, cultural pride, and the entertainment industry's ongoing reckoning with who gets to tell whose stories.

But Wait, Who Is Himesh Patel?

Born in Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, to Gujarati Hindu parents whose families emigrated from East Africa (his mother from Zambia, his father from Kenya), Patel grew up speaking Gujarati. A role in a school play impressed a teacher so much that his parents enrolled him to a local theatre group. That early nudge led to nine years on BBC's EastEnders, where he played the bookish Tamwar Masood across a reported 566 episodes.

His breakout came in 2019 with Danny Boyle's Yesterday, in which he played the only man on Earth who remembers The Beatles ever existed. From there, his career took a sharp turn upward. A small role as an arms dealer in Nolan's Tenet (2020) put him on the director's radar, a part in Don't Look Up (2021) put him alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and an Emmy nomination plus a SAG Award for HBO's Station Eleven (2021) made him a familiar fact in prestige television. The Aeronauts, The Luminaries, Enola Holmes 2 (you might know him as Dr. Watson in the movies), Good Grief and HBO's The Franchise rounded out a decade that took him from soap opera regular to a name the movie biggies call back for their magnum opus.

Which brings us to The Odyssey. It came the way Nolan apparently prefers to do things: off the grid. Shortly before the 2024 holidays, producer Emma Thomas met Patel in London and handed him a physical script. It wasn't untill a few days ago that people even connected his name to the movie.

Who Is Eurylochus, And Why Should You Bother?

Patel plays Eurylochus, described in the film's own casting notes as Odysseus's second-in-command and incompetent brother-in-law. In Homer's text, Eurylochus is Odysseus's most persistent internal critic: the crew member who questions his captain's judgment at nearly every turn, and who eventually talks the starving crew into slaughtering the sacred cattle of Helios on the island of Thrinacia, against Odysseus's direct orders. This act of defiance is what dooms the entire crew, Eurylochus included, and leaves Odysseus to complete the journey home alone (very Robert Downey Jr's Levi Strauss in Oppenheimer, isn't it? We'll only find out once we watch it).

The "Woke Casting" Debate That Preceded Patel

Long before Patel's name entered the conversation, The Odyssey was already fielding questions about who was playing whom. Lupita Nyong'o, an African-American actress, takes on the dual role of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, with the former long being hailed the most beautiful woman who ever existed (if you haven't seen the Twitter wars somehow, you can still smell the criticisms a mile away). Zendaya, another biracial American actress, plays Athena, goddess of wisdom and war. And in the film's most unexpected piece of casting, Travis Scott, the rapper, plays the bard who narrates the crew's journey home.

Nolan has defended that last choice directly, framing it as a deliberate nod to the oral tradition behind the Odyssey itself: for centuries the poem existed only as something recited and sung, passed down by traveling storytellers long before it was ever written. Casting a rapper as the bard, in Nolan's telling, is a way of drawing a line between ancient oral poetry and the closest thing modern culture has to it. It sounds like a clever piece of world-building, but plain old racism aside, people are questioning what purpose it serves to add black actors into a period piece where, they claim, there's no chance the characters would be anything but Greek (fun fact: none of the white actors are of Greek descent either).

The Debate Around Patel

With this being the backdrop Patel has walked into, his casting, of course, has split opinion. One side of the argument looks at Indian representation in major Hollywood movies: an Indian actor landing a named, possibly even a central role in one of the year's biggest films is rare, and rarer still in a story this canonical. A decade ago, a role like Eurylochus would almost certainly have gone to a white British or American actor without a second thought. That it didn't is, by most measures, progress.

The other side of the argument claims to look at the story: does casting diversity in a story this specifically Greek end up flattening the specificity that makes the Odyssey the Odyssey? Bronze Age Greece was not a multicultural mosaic in the way modern casting choices sometimes imply, and critics of the trend argue that swapping ethnicity in and out of mythological roles, however well-intentioned, treats the source material as infinitely elastic rather than as a text rooted in a particular time and place. It's a debate that predates this film by years and will outlive it by more, but The Odyssey, with its scale and its Nolan-sized spotlight, has become the current flashpoint.

Patel himself isn't the architect of that argument, and it's worth separating the actor from the debate his casting has reignited. What happens next is largely out of his hands: the industry's approach to mythological casting isn't going to be settled by one performance in one film. The only thing that can fully answers the skeptics (if at all they can look beyond their skepticism) is doing the role justice: a performance substantial enough, and a film that's genuinely good enough, that the conversation shifts from why he was cast to how good he was in the part.