--- title: 'Anne Hathaway Plays the One Who Waits, and the Oscar Race Can''t Decide What to Call It' type: 'blog post' section: 'Away From Set' standfirst: '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.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-06' updated: '2026-08-06' about_people: - 'Anne Hathaway' - 'Christopher Nolan' - 'Matt Damon' about_films: - 'Interstellar (2014)' tags: - 'Anne Hathaway The Odyssey Penelope' - 'Christopher Nolan The Odyssey 2026' - 'Anne Hathaway lead or supporting actress Oscar' - 'The Odyssey IMAX 70mm film' - 'Anne Hathaway Christopher Nolan collaborations' - 'The Odyssey box office 2026' sources: - 'https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/Anne-Hathaway-Jon-Bernthal-Matt-Damon-on-Filming-Nolans-THE-ODYSSEY-20260805' - 'https://www.goldderby.com/film/2026/anne-hathaway-odyssey-lead-actress-oscars/' - 'https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/tv/after-the-odyssey-anne-hathaway-takes-on-her-darkest-role-in-paramount-s-6-part-thriller/ar-AA29uzP2' - 'https://variety.com/2026/film/awards/anne-hathaway-oscars-odyssey-lead-actress-supporting-1236819669/' - 'https://www.india.com/entertainment/the-odyssey-twitter-review-christopher-nolans-film-wins-praise-matt-damon-and-anne-hathaway-impress-audience-tom-holland-gets-mixed-reactions-check-tweets-8476365/' - 'https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/photos-odyssey-red-carpet-premiere-193157173.html' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/anne-hathaway-plays-the-one-who-waits-and-the-oscar-race-cant-decide-what-to-call-it' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # 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.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-06 · Away From Set ## Anne Hathaway plays Penelope, and the part is all refusal [Anne Hathaway](https://cinepixo.com/people/anne-hathaway) plays Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, in [Christopher Nolan](https://cinepixo.com/people/christopher-nolan)'s *The Odyssey*, which opened on 17 July 2026 after a London premiere on 6 July. [Matt Damon](https://cinepixo.com/people/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. ![Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan and Anne Hathaway at the New York premiere of The Odyssey, 14 July 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/181b8de9-fc1a-4a63-b8ae-d0fb91001fa0.webp) *Photo: PhilipRomano · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DamonNolanHathaway-byPhilipRomano.jpg)* ## 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*](https://cinepixo.com/movies/interstellar-2014) 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. ![Anne Hathaway on the red carpet at the New York premiere of The Odyssey, 14 July 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/61942854-5e8f-4877-a2e7-5f913ac3875e.webp) ![Anne Hathaway with the crowd at the New York premiere of The Odyssey, 14 July 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/b650078f-defe-4b16-96ba-28ae219baa2a.webp) *Photos: PhilipRomano · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source 1](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AnneHathaway-byPhilipRomano5.jpg), [source 2](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AnneHathawayInCrowd-byPhilipRomano.jpg)* ## Lead or supporting: what the Oscar question is really about Since release, the awards press has been circling the same problem. *Variety* asked in late July whether Hathaway's campaign would run in Lead Actress or Supporting. *Gold Derby* came back to it in August, weighing her in Best Actress. Neither landed on an answer. It gets talked about as strategy — where is the field thinner, who else is in it — and that hides what is being asked. A film called *The Odyssey* makes Odysseus the lead by title alone. But the movie is built as two halves: a man moving and a woman holding. If Ithaca carries the same weight as the sea, filing her under supporting describes a different film than the one that played. Hathaway has stood on both sides of this line. Her Academy Award, in 2013, was Best Supporting Actress for Fantine in *Les Misérables*, a part measured in scenes rather than minutes, and nobody argued. Fantine works because it is short and complete. Penelope is the harder case: she is in the film constantly, doing something a camera has to be persuaded to read as action at all. ![A wooden horse staged outside the New York premiere of The Odyssey, 14 July 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/5e98e511-1730-4847-8564-7bbac8cc0a5a.webp) ![Costumed soldiers at the New York premiere of The Odyssey, 14 July 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/8c254ccb-f6f9-4ee0-9413-3251120b5e5c.webp) *Photos: PhilipRomano · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source 1](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OdysseyPremiereHorse-byPhilipRomano.jpg), [source 2](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OdysseyPremiereSoldiers-byPhilipRomano.jpg)* ## Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, and what that does to a quiet performance Nothing around her is small. *The Odyssey* is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras, with Hoyte van Hoytema behind them, burning more than two million feet of stock across a 91-day shoot that ran from February to August 2025 and wrapped nine days early. They filmed in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Western Sahara, Malta and on the Universal lot, on a reported $250 million. It runs 173 minutes. It has taken $931 million worldwide, the fifth-biggest release of 2026. Put a performance built on stillness inside the largest format anyone has ever shot a whole film in and you are making a strange bet. A face that size shows everything, including the work. Early word suggested the bet paid: a roundup of social posts after the premiere, collected by India.com, found the praise landing on Damon and Hathaway, with Holland's Telemachus splitting the room. That is audience chatter rather than criticism, but it is the first thing anyone hears. ![Anne Hathaway at a Seoul press conference for The Devil Wears Prada 2, April 2026](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/a4ff83e9-572b-4f29-9dc8-c44349454e56.webp) *Photo: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism — Lee Jeong-woo · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anne_Hathaway-_Press_conference_for_the_film_%22The_Devil_Wears_Prada_2%22_-_55194764955.jpg)* ## What Anne Hathaway does next She has not stopped to wait for the campaign to resolve. In early August she turned up on *Late Night with Seth Meyers* beside Damon and Jon Bernthal, who plays Menelaus, swapping set stories instead of plot, as BroadwayWorld reported — the film by then also streaming on Peacock. Her next announced project, according to MSN, is a six-part Paramount+ thriller being sold as her darkest role so far. It lands in the same year she played Andrea Sachs again in *The Devil Wears Prada 2*. One year: a sequel to the comedy that made her famous, a Greek queen in 70mm, and a limited series pitched on how far she will go. She keeps choosing parts whose difficulty does not show up in the logline, and then making the difficulty the thing everyone talks about on the way out. The part is a woman at a loom, undoing her own day's work so that tomorrow still has to happen, and that is the performance an entire awards season cannot decide what to call. ## In this piece - [Anne Hathaway](https://cinepixo.com/people/anne-hathaway) - [Christopher Nolan](https://cinepixo.com/people/christopher-nolan) - [Matt Damon](https://cinepixo.com/people/matt-damon) - 2014 · [Interstellar](https://cinepixo.com/movies/interstellar-2014) ## Sources - https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/Anne-Hathaway-Jon-Bernthal-Matt-Damon-on-Filming-Nolans-THE-ODYSSEY-20260805 - https://www.goldderby.com/film/2026/anne-hathaway-odyssey-lead-actress-oscars/ - https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/tv/after-the-odyssey-anne-hathaway-takes-on-her-darkest-role-in-paramount-s-6-part-thriller/ar-AA29uzP2 - https://variety.com/2026/film/awards/anne-hathaway-oscars-odyssey-lead-actress-supporting-1236819669/ - https://www.india.com/entertainment/the-odyssey-twitter-review-christopher-nolans-film-wins-praise-matt-damon-and-anne-hathaway-impress-audience-tom-holland-gets-mixed-reactions-check-tweets-8476365/ - https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/photos-odyssey-red-carpet-premiere-193157173.html Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/anne-hathaway-plays-the-one-who-waits-and-the-oscar-race-cant-decide-what-to-call-it Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.