Anne Hathaway Plays the One Who Waits, and the Oscar Race Can't Decide What to Call It
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and whether that counts as a leading performance is the best argument of this awards season.
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, and the part is all refusal
Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which opened on 17 July 2026 after a London premiere on 6 July. Matt Damon is Odysseus. Tom Holland is their son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Antinous, the loudest of the suitors camped in her hall.
What Penelope does, in Homer, is refuse, and she does it with a trick. She weaves a shroud by day and unpicks it at night so it is never finished, because a finished shroud means choosing one of the men waiting in her hall. It buys her years. Whatever a film makes of that, the part it hands an actor is built out of waiting on purpose: the arithmetic of how many more nights, and what happens on the day the suitors think to count the rows.
Photo: PhilipRomano · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Her third film with Christopher Nolan
This is the third time Nolan has cast her, and the parts keep getting quieter. She was Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, all motion and lies. She was Amelia Brand in Interstellar in 2014, the scientist handed the film's most exposed speech — the one about love reaching across time — and asked to say it without embarrassment, which she managed when a lot of very good actors would not have.
Penelope asks for the opposite of both. No cat burglary, no monologue — a woman whose whole action is refusing, at length, in a film that runs nearly three hours. Making that read as something rather than nothing is the job, and it is harder than either part Nolan gave her before.
