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Tribune News Service

Samantha Morton did not mean to start humming during that scene in The Odyssey, the scene everyone is talking about, when, as the sorceress Circe, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, literally moulding them into their true savage selves.
It was not in the script. It just happened. And when Morton was done, she looked over to director Christopher Nolan, waiting for him to say something like, “Maybe try it without the humming, Samantha.”
But Nolan did not say anything, so Morton did it again and the music that was swirling inside her head, which she remembers now as a symphony of glass harmoniums and theremin, kept coming out as Circe went about her witchy business, altering her gluttonous guests, who were busy slurping and gulping down her stew.
“These are sounds that can make you go mad, apparently,” Morton says, reclining on her bed at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. “So to transform the men, the magic came not just from my hands but from my sounds.”
Morton unabashedly believes in magic. How else, she asks, can you explain how a girl who was shuttled between children’s homes and a dozen foster families, only to be living on the streets of Nottingham, England, at the age of 14 with a criminal record, is here talking with the press now, sipping green tea at the Chelsea?
“That’s got to be guardian angels and love – and not that I suddenly became good at acting and got a job,” says Morton, a veteran who has been at it for 35 years, dazzling audiences and stealing scenes for the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jim Sheridan and now Nolan.
“I’ve always believed that anything is possible and there’s no doubt in here” – she pats her heart – “because I’ve always felt this immense love for me from another entity.”


When Morton heard that Nolan wanted to meet her for The Odyssey, she wept. If that sounds dramatic, she makes no apologies. She likens it to being an athlete who qualifies to represent their country at the Olympics. She had spent decades honing her craft for that phone call. When it came, she flew to Los Angeles in January 2025, during the wildfires, embarking on what would become the best job interview of her life.
Asked what she remembers about that meeting, she says, laughing, “I think it went really well.”
Morton told Nolan she had not read The Odyssey, which, when you quit school at the age of 12, makes sense. Flying back home to England – she and her husband live in East Sussex with their children, 18-year-old daughter Edie and 12-year-old son Teddy – she recalled that, yes, she knew a bit of The Odyssey from having seen it parodied on an episode of The Simpsons.
But Morton does not believe in bogging herself down in research, not since starring in a British TV production of Jane Eyre when she was 19 and carried around a heavily highlighted copy of the Charlotte Bronte book, despairing whenever the adaptation deviated from the novel. From that point on, she stuck to the script and her own imagination.
Thinking about Circe, Morton recalls going to the library and finding the Howard Pyle fairy-tale book King Stork. She remembers being mesmerised by the story’s wicked witch. She recalls other witches from folk tales like Baba Yaga, frightening characters but also “women possessing an innocence that had been eroded over the years by the harshness of life”.
Morton does a playful verbal evasion when discussing the nuts-and-bolts aspects of shooting the scene where Circe transforms Odysseus’ men, saying that back in the day, when behind-the-scenes features were prevalent on DVDs, she routinely declined to participate.
“I didn’t mean to be tricky, but it was like: this is my private moment. This is for me,” she says. “I do like the idea of a little mystery.”

But then a beat later, she laughs it off and dives in, remembering that her husband showed her an Instagram post from Nolan’s set revealing how the film’s Cyclops was, in fact, a puppet.
“Oh my gosh – I love puppets!” Morton says, and off she goes, saying how much she adores Jim Henson and how The Dark Crystal is one of her favourite films.
What she will say about her Odyssey scene is that there were no digital effects. Everything was real and “in-camera”, and that she was so in the zone that she barely remembers any of it, only flashes.
“That’s not CGI,” Morton says. “That’s human brilliance and a connectivity of me as a performer, almost dancing and feeling one. And not to say that it was sexual, but I wanted it to be very sensual when she’s with the men and the animals, just like, you know, that she’s almost one with them.
“What was lovely about that,” Morton begins and then stops, wondering if she should draw back the curtain on the creative process. She goes ahead, describing how Nolan prepared her for the “moulding” part of the scene.
“There was a day on set when Chris was like, ‘OK,’ and he put his hand in [the model] because I was a little scared. It’s like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he puts his hand in the thing, and you’re like, ‘Oh no!’ I was a little nervous, but Chris did it first. I think he actually cut his finger.” She giggles. “You know, he’s going to go in first, like getting into the cold water in the sea. I felt protected and supported in that whole process.”
When Odysseus’ men arrive at Circe’s home, hungry, asking to be fed, Circe seems frightened – understandably so. She is alone, and these soldiers have a history of pillaging and taking what they want. And yet, she is a powerful sorceress. Is Circe really scared or tricking them to lure them in?
“I played that like she was genuinely frightened because she was caught off guard,” Morton says. “I also wanted to play somebody that was all ages, so I played her like a 16-year-old girl in that scene. And then in other scenes, I’m playing her as a 90-year-old woman or a 49-year-old woman or a sister or a mother or a grandmother. I just wanted her to be ageless.”

Morton, looking out for Circe, stresses that transforming Odysseus’ men was not purely vengeful.
“It’s not just hate,” she says. “It’s not just harm. It’s not just anger. It’s almost like a Zen master within the goddess role of the teaching as well. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ gluttony, greed, all of these things.”
There is a righteous feminist rage underneath the scene as well, a modernisation that brings The Odyssey fiercely and disturbingly up to date – another reason why people leave the cinema talking about Morton.
Nolan thinks The Odyssey, in some weird way, “lived or died over that character – she was the fulcrum.” He said in an interview that “after one of her takes, the crew gave her a great round of applause.” Emma Thomas, Nolan’s producing partner and wife, later recalled that the last time that had happened was with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
Morton brought her son, Teddy, to New York for the premiere of The Odyssey because she wanted to show him the place where her creative spirit was born. Morton first came to New York as a teen to do press for the 1996 TV film Emma, returned a year later to promote Jane Eyre and then could not bring herself to leave, “sofa-surfing” at friends’ flats so she could immerse herself in the city.
“New York stole my heart,” she says. It is where she first got into literature, devouring Charles Bukowski, roaming the aisles at the St Mark’s Bookshop, checking out film from Kim’s Video and gobbling hash browns and eggs over easy at the Waverly Diner.
Not long after, Morton scored the role that would land her the first of two Oscar nominations – for now, at least – playing the mute laundress in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. The production put her up in a Greenwich Village flat, and when it ended, she moved to the East Village.
Only the diner remains, but Morton still plans on touring the area with Teddy, showing off all of her old haunts and, yes, having a cup of soup at the Waverly.
“Life is good right now,” Morton says, smiling. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll indulge in some hash browns.”


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Samantha Morton talks about Christopher Nolan helping her when she was ‘a little scared’, playing Circe as an ageless character… and humming


Samantha Morton talks about Christopher Nolan helping her when she was ‘a little scared’, playing Circe as an ageless character… and humming.


Christopher Nolan

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Samantha Morton on THAT pig scene in The Odyssey: ‘I wanted it to be very sensual’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Samantha Morton talks about Christopher Nolan helping her when she was ‘a little scared’, playing Circe as an ageless character… and humming

Samantha Morton talks about Christopher Nolan helping her when she was ‘a little scared’, playing Circe as an ageless character… and humming