As far as teaser trailers for summer blockbusters go, it takes quite a lot to make jaded audiences – or cynical critics – sit up and say, “What the hell?” But what’s exactly what the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eagerly awaited The Odyssey has done. Not because it has featured a couple of new shots of Tom Holland’s Telemachus squaring off with Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, or Matt Damon’s Odysseus participating in the bloody sack of Troy with his fellow Greeks, but because it introduces the most unexpected cameo of the year, possibly of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the latest feature of Nolan’s all-star cast: the hip-hop artiste Travis Scott, appearing in the somewhat unlikely role of a staff-beating herald.
Given Nolan’s notorious reliance on secrecy when it comes to his mega-budget pictures – which usually translates into massive opening-weekend box-office receipts, as audiences rush to see his films before they’re spoiled online – it is quite clear that it was wholly intentional that he and his marketing crew knew that the revelation of Scott’s appearance in the picture, complete with close-up, will be the talking point of this trailer. The ten-time Grammy nominee was not mentioned in any of the earlier cast lists for the film, unlike the likes of Matt Damon, Pattinson, Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway or many more, but the revelation that Scott is going to be making what is, at the very least, an attention-grabbing cameo has, as intended, gone viral.
Granted, the few seconds that Scott is on screen in the teaser do not especially suggest that he will do the same for cinema as he has done for music, as he intones the suitably portentous lines “A war… a man… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… it burns, screaming to the ground.” And then, with a few shots of fiery chaos, the brief preview is over, and the speculation can begin in earnest. Why has Nolan cast Scott, whose only other acting credits are a brief role in the 2019 independent picture Gully and a larger part in the experimental Harmony Korine-directed Aggro Dr1fTt?
In fact, the answer to that one is relatively straightforward. Nolan has already worked with Scott on the theme song for Tenet, “The Plan,” which the director described as “the final piece of a yearlong puzzle” and called his contribution “immediate, insightful and profound.” Those who have previously pegged Nolan as something of a music classicist whose favorite acts are Radiohead, David Bowie and his erstwhile collaborator Hans Zimmer may have been surprised by this, but the appearance of a (somewhat cringe-making) note in which Nolan raves about ‘The Plan” (“I can’t wait to hear it on the IMAX speakers, and see those sheep stampede across the giant screen as part of a Travis/Tenet/Travis sandwich!”) confirms that this is a genuine desire to reunite with someone he respects as an artist, rather than an eye-watering attempt to make his picture acceptable to a youthful audience.
Nolan has form on casting iconic musicians in acting roles – David Bowie as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, and, to slightly lesser effect, Harry Styles in Dunkirk (not a One Direction fan, the director apparently cast him without any idea of his fame) – and so Scott’s appearance in The Odyssey, which everyone involved kept under wraps until yesterday, has given the film a jolt of the genuinely unexpected. Granted, it feels wildly, bizarrely incongruous, too – like something out of a Billy Crystal Oscar montage or a SNL skit – but if the early footage of Nolan’s film is to be believed, the finished picture could be far stranger and more unconventional than just about any other $250 million summer blockbuster, complete with body-horror Cyclops, dead men rising from the black-soiled underworld and many more as yet unseen wonders and terrors. Expectations of a stately, David Lean-styled epic should probably be parked: as Scott himself once rapped, “I tried to show ’em, yeah.” Soon, we’ll all see exactly what’s what.
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