Himesh Patel Had an Existential Freak-out on The Odyssey

Matt Damon is the obvious star of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but when it comes to the ensemble cast around him, Himesh Patel plays the most substantial supporting character in the film. He is Eurylochus, Odysseus’s second-in-command, who recognizes the moral rot spread by his king’s actions long before the monarch does. It’s Eurylochus who reminds Odysseus that his men need to eat, and questions Odysseus’s decision to shoot another arrow after they escape from the cyclops, and silently judges Odysseus’s pride when he insists on listening to the sirens’ call. The world’s understanding of right and wrong is crumbling, and Patel’s troubled expressions as he grows more skeptical of his commander serve as the film’s built-in conscience.

Patel shot his scenes over six months and across six countries (all while co-writing an adaptation of the memoir Brown Baby with its author, his friend Nikesh Shukla). He spent much of that time on a 115-foot Norwegian boat beside Damon, slowly transforming Eurylochus’s inner conflict into outward disdain. Patel is most restrained during a silent sequence when, Eurylochus’s ears blocked with wax, he takes in the sorry sight of Odysseus tied to the ship’s mast, yearning for the sirens. After the triumphant king turns back to shoot the cyclops Polyphemus, Patel delivers a cutting line: “Couldn’t you have shown some mercy?” But the actor is at his most manically animated with the sorceress Circe (Samantha Morton), who has food that Eurylochus’s starving crewmates need. Their interaction precedes one of the film’s most nightmarish moments, involving a mixture of practical and special effects that Patel compares to An American Werewolf in London. “I had some sort of existential freak-out” shooting it, Patel says.

His ability to play weary resignation while maintaining a character’s commitment to doing what’s needed in impossibly difficult situations is Patel’s most nuanced mode. He excels at playing people who have a virtuous core made gritty by ambition, as in the superhero satire The Franchise. He also has a knack for finding the stir-crazy impatience that propels a protagonist forward, as in the adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. In Enola Holmes 3, he brings quiet tenacity to straight man Dr. John Watson, complicating the veteran’s familiar trauma narrative with a vehement disapproval of the British empire. But he relished his role in Riz Ahmed’s Bait, veering away from his normal good-guy roles to play a smug rival actor to Ahmed’s main character.

The son of Indian Gujarati parents who settled in the U.K. and still run newsagent shops in Cambridgeshire, Patel’s career is a mixture of roles that do and don’t acknowledge his ethnicity. As Mahir, an agent tasked with helping fight the future in Nolan’s Tenet, his background never comes into play. In The Odyssey, it’s part of the metatext, a reflection of how imperialism’s selfishness draws all people into social decay. “No one expects to get a call from Christopher Nolan when he’s making a new movie,” Patel recalls of the moment he was cast as Eurylochus, “and I certainly didn’t expect it to be an offer.”

You worked with Christopher Nolan on Tenet. Did he just come to you again and say, “Himesh, I want you to be in The Odyssey too. Here’s the role.” 
Absurdly, that is what happened. I’ll never forget that phone call. He told me, “We’re doing The Odyssey,” and on one hand, I was like, This is crazy. On the other hand, I was like, He’s the guy to do it.

But I didn’t know The Odyssey particularly well. We don’t study it the way it is in the American curriculum. I read the translation of it while I waited for the script to be hand-delivered to me by Emma Thomas, his wife. I thought, This is cool. I get to do all the great set pieces. I wasn’t ready for what an amazing work of writing the script is. Also, my role within it, I was floored by what I was being gifted.

In the original text, Eurylochus is not brave or pragmatic. In the film, he’s almost Odysseus’s second conscience. How did you and Christopher Nolan talk about making Eurylochus a moral foil to Odysseus?
There is a heart to this character. There were a few tweaks we made along the way, subtle things like Eurylochus not cutting off the head of the statue of Athena. We went, “Actually, he’s got a moral conscience that wouldn’t allow him to do that.” The thesis that we land on is about the consequences of war and the choices that we make. How barbaric do we really want to be? There’s going to be a split. You see it in that shot of Odysseus as he’s walking through the morning after the raid. Chris actually went through all of us in that crew and was like, “You’re happy about it, and you’re not happy about it, and you’re happy about it, and you’re not happy about it.” We all had our own relationship with what we had just done.

We also made the decision to not have Eurylochus in the horse. He was entrusted with being on the outside and being the one who hands Odysseus his armor as they get into the walls of Troy. Chris is always thinking about tweaks. He’s shooting all day, and then he watches the rushes. “Is this working? What needs to shift?” He’s always thinking about how the characters are relating to each other and the piece as a whole, and I love that, because then it feels very collaborative. He asked me before, “Do you want to be in the horse? Because I’m thinking about this thing,” and I was like, “If you think that’s the best thing for this character.”

Was there a moment where you had the realization, I’m here for this reason, and Chris wanted me for this? 
Chris is famously circumspect about what he thinks of a take. But I did get that moment, when I’m saying, “I’m going to pull the boat in here,” and Matt is like, “You’re all going to die,” and I’m like, “These men are starving.” We did a take on that, and Chris was like, “That was really great.” And I was like [whispers], “Thanks.” I’m looking at some of the other guys and they’re mouthing, “Fuck! What?” I went, I’m just going to take that one and put that in my heart and soul for the rest of my career.

That was halfway through the shoot. There are many reasons I felt like an imposter on this job, but that stuff I felt good about.

What caused that imposter feeling? 
I wish I’d had more time to work on my physicality for the role. When you see actors like Matt and Jon Bernthal, it’s part of their lifestyle. They really look after themselves. I’m 35 and going, You’ve got to make a choice now, man. This is your instrument. What are you going to do with it? There were times where I would beat myself up about it, but there were times where I would go, Just see it as a path forward.

Early in the film, when the men have raided a village, a villager is brought before you and you say, “We’re Greeks, from Ithaca.” That felt very purposeful for two reasons. One, to have your character say this underlined the inclusivity of this film. Second, the Greeks are an invading force. Odysseus’s men are not “good,” necessarily. How did you understand that scene?
That scene is chaos. We’d done some stuff on the boat earlier, and Hoyte van Hoytema wanted this specific golden light for that scene. They built it all, and things are getting set on fire. There are animals. This actor, Yannis Kokiasmenos, came in for half a day and is holding his own, smashing this scene.

I was thinking about Eurylochus: Am I proud of this? That was a moment where we had a minute to talk about it. It was fairly early on in Greece, our second location. He’s still like, This is what happens if you don’t welcome us. This is Zeus’s law. He’s still morally in that place. The question mark for me when I was playing that scene was, when I walk away, is Jovan Adepo’s character, Elpanor, about to cut this guy’s head off? Where are we right now? You see the devastation of it, and yet it’s their way of life: We won the war. If you’re not going to welcome us, this is what’s going to happen.

And then to see how that changes for Eurylochus, it’s fascinating. That erosion of Zeus’s law, this idea that we’ve made this one choice and it has completely eroded how we view each other, in terms of hostility towards each other but also reticence to welcome each other in light of that hostility. It encompasses so much about what’s continued to happen in the world today. It’s why the story has endured for 3,000 years — the tragedy of war and what it does to both sides of any conflict.

Later in their journey, the men meet Circe. It’s a change from the text that your character leads the group that meets her — you don’t quite mutiny against Odysseus. 
It’s not the end. I just need a break. [Laughs.]

You leave Odysseus behind and lead the men to Circe, where you eat the stew she feeds you and she transforms your group into pigs. What do you remember about filming that sequence with Samantha Morton?
It mirrors the scene we were just talking about, and the difference is that he’s made a choice: We can’t do that again. That’s the attitude we went in with at these other places, and look what happened. That’s why he tries to say to her, “I’m not going to hurt you. We just need to do what we need to do.” But can he speak for the rest of his men? What lengths would he go to stop them if they made immoral choices?

We were so excited to shoot that sequence. We start the day at the bottom of that hill, with the hut at the top built by Ruth De Jong, the production designer, an utter genius. We had to go zigzagging up. It was July in Scotland, and really hot, and we were ready for some food. Samantha is incredible in that scene. This is not Circe’s first rodeo with this kind of masculinity, and the way she articulates that: “What did you expect me to do? I’m on my own here.” The depth of humanity Chris has given to all these characters, even the cyclops, Polyphemus. With Circe, it’s not just some woman who turns them into pigs. It’s a woman left with no choice because she feels under threat, and she’s disgusted by these people she views as intruders. Those choices she made, like singing while she’s transforming us — it’s haunting and full of that pain we’re talking about. It felt full of a life lived.

And Chris keeps his cards very close to his chest in terms of how things are going to be done. Everything we did with Polyphemus, I didn’t get to see until we got to the cave. Ultimately, I didn’t see how it all got pulled together until I saw the movie. With this Circe sequence, I don’t want to spoil the wizardry behind it, but people who’ve seen An American Werewolf in London have seen transformations happen in front of their eyes, and they didn’t have CGI to work with back then. It’s that world of special effects and incredible engineering, whereby I was looking at my own face, transforming and mutating. I had some sort of existential freak-out. [Laughs.] There was one point where we had a contraption doing one thing, but they still needed my hand feeding me. The camera’s here [gestures upward], and I’m feeding myself [elevates his hand and arm while ducking], watching something happen to me. It was the freakiest thing.

It’s one of the many privileges of this job to see something like this come together. Then the hilarity of, we had just finished shoving all this stuff into our faces, and all of our beards were dripping with broth, and then they go, “All right, good. Can we bring in the chairs for the pigs, please?” And they bring in these stools, and these pigs start trotting in.

What was the hardest moment for you on The Odyssey set, and how did you work through it? 
Those sequences of getting in the water were tough — not because of getting wet or whatever, I’m up for that. But once you hit the water, you’re suddenly trudging through treacle, and there’s a time limit because the boat’s pulling away. The whole point is you’re scrambling to get on that boat, and there’s not any trickery to help you. We had some bumps and scrapes and bruises because of the way the armor works. It was difficult to learn to maneuver your body around this plate that’s not shifting. You don’t have as much leverage with your body.

I want to go back to Tenet. You’ve talked about how your nine years on the British soap opera EastEnders were very work-ethic based. You’re driving yourself to work, you’re paying for your own lunch. Do you think that experience prepared you for a Nolan film? Is there something about how you work that makes you a “Nolan actor,” as Bernthal has talked about?
There is a way that Chris likes to make movies that is therefore reflected in the movie. There’s an immediacy, an urgency, a tactility, and a sort of energy you’re not going to get if you have actors going back to sit in their chairs every ten minutes. It’s not expecting anyone else to pamper you, or to feel that you are owed certain things. Everything else is gigantic, but it’s a very indie feeling around the camera. Chris, his DP, and his script supervisor have a monitor; no one else has any oversight of what we’re shooting. He’s just looking at the frame lines. He’s not looking at the scene; he’ll see the scene tomorrow or the day after, when the dailies come in. He’s actually watching you and what’s happening around him rather than what’s happening in the camera.

Chris is like, “We’re all here to work hard,” and he doesn’t have us do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He’s there with us, every time. Those scenes of us scrambling back onto the boat from the cyclops or the Laestrygonians, all the water work, that was tough stuff — and he’s in the water with us, because the camera’s in the water with us, and he’s by the camera. He’s in his wet-water gear, ready to go. He’s not over in some tent. That’s the kind of filmmaker that he is and the kind of movie that he wants to make. There probably is a line to draw between having that self-sustaining route that I had, where you look after yourself and do the work, and how Chris operates. I love that, to be honest. I’ve never been comfortable with people doing things for me.

Is that your acting ideology, personal ideology, both?
Maybe a bit of both, but sometimes it is better to realize you should lean on people because they’re there for you.

I’m going to make a sweeping generalization, but as the child of immigrants, there is a certain amount of, “I’ve got to do this myself because nobody else is going to do it for me.”
I’ve had that exact conversation with so many of my friends; it’s a child-of-immigrants thing, and also a class thing. I’ve got friends who are white but from working-class backgrounds, and it’s a similar thing: You work twice as hard to get half as much. Speaking for my parents, as immigrants in a country that has only gotten, to be honest, more hostile over their lifetime, everything’s always going to feel precarious. No matter what you’ve built, you’re going to be like, They could take it away from me at any point. They simply can’t relax, which is heartbreaking.

Bait has a story line about the child-of-immigrants experience. Your character, Raj, is a popular actor and rival to Shah, played by series creator and writer Riz Ahmed. Raj steals Shah’s story about his family experiencing a hate crime and uses it as a way to become more respected and popular. Tell me about what this villainous character presented to you that you haven’t done in your other work. 
Riz called me. We knew each other through various mutual friends, and we both wrote an essay in The Good Immigrant. I’d long been an admirer of his work. He told me about the show. It’s quite meta, and we do probably go up for the same stuff many times. I would not put myself in the bracket of Riz, he’s on some other level of his own, but there is crossover. I read the role and thought it was great, knowing that it was going to be him, but also Bassam Tariq, a great director, and Guz Khan, who’s one of the funniest men alive, and Sian Clifford, who’s wonderful. The show’s really special. Getting to play a complete dickhead, a smarmy moron, was such fun.

You’ve talked about how many of your roles haven’t hinged on your ethnicity, but Bait is very much about ethnicity and race. Being on that set, having so many other South Asian actors and creatives on it, did it bring something different out of you as an actor? 
It was lovely to be shooting a show like that in London, and seeing that many people come together. The first day that I got there and Riz and I were running the lines, I was so fucking glad we were working together. Usually, one of us is going to get the part. Hopefully one day I’ll get to work with Dev Patel. I want more of that. I want us to be in things together and not always be the one person in the thing. Then Nabhaan Rizwan came in — we never had any scenes together, but he was there on the same day doing a fitting. We all hung out a bit, and to feel part of this community, it was inspiring. That’s what I love about what Riz created with Bait. It’s a very personal story, but also it means that we’ve now got a show that’s got him in it, me in it, Nabhaan in it, Guz in it, so many other great actors in it. That exists now.

In Enola Holmes 3, you have a long scene as Dr. John Watson where you describe your father as a “loyal servant of the British Raj” who believed in the English monarchy’s right to rule India. Tell me about that speech. 
We discussed it broadly when they offered me the part back in 2021. I had a Zoom with writer Jack Thorne. He was very clear with me about exploring those ideas. The casting of me in this role, the casting of Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Moriarty, these are specific choices. They’re dealing with a lot of different facets of colonialism in that movie. I really admired that this very popular Netflix franchise that’s aimed at younger people went, “Let’s tell a story about colonialism.” I’d love to see more of that sort of stuff. As the U.K., we don’t talk about colonialism enough. We just don’t.

Jack had written that scene, and they were all ears as, “We’re not people of color. We’re obviously going to defer to you if you have notes,” which I really appreciated. As an actor, I had suggestions for the flow of the thing. I love the way it sits in the movie, because on the page, it was just a scene where it’s the two of us and I give that monologue. But in the edit, where it cross-cuts, I thought it was really inspired. I love that this version of Watson has that specificity.

In May and early June, you shot the pilot of Ryan Coogler’s reboot of The X-Files in Vancouver. Tell me about being on a TV set run by Ryan after his Oscar win for Sinners. What was the atmosphere like? 
I didn’t really know what to expect, because I hadn’t worked with Ryan before. I heard really great things about him, and it’s all borne out. He’s an artist who deeply cares about every detail of what he does, same as Chris. He’s poring over every aspect of this, because he’s setting this whole thing up — provided we get picked up to series, but the mentality of it is, I have to do the work now. It means the world to him, the Oscar win; same for Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who shot it, but work is work. I’m sure the Oscar gave them some sort of leverage for creative freedom, to some degree, but at the same time, it’s the world of TV. It was a really great creative experience.

Did it feel similar in scope to Station Eleven or to The Franchise? 
It’s big. I don’t know what more to say without getting into territory that Disney will have me in prison for, but yeah.

If the show doesn’t move forward, what will an attempt to to make a new X-Files have meant to you? 
I’d still be extremely proud of it. With any work as an actor, unless you are the writer-director as well, you have very little control over how it ends up. The most important thing for me is, Did I have a good time making it? And suffice to say, I had a great time. Working with Danielle Deadwyler, who I’ve known for a few years now, we hit the ground running. I hope it’s a jumping-off point, but let’s see.

You starred in 2024’s The Franchise, the Armando Iannucci–produced satire on HBO. It was canceled after one season. Looking back on it, what do you wish had gone differently about the reception to the show?
Oh, I don’t know. There’s still a lot of people who tell me they love the show and were gutted it didn’t get a second season. So was I. That cast, we’re still friends. I saw Billy Magnussen when I was in Vancouver because he was about to shoot the second season of The Audacity. Obviously I wish it had been received more warmly, but you can’t control this stuff. At least I know it connected with a significant amount of people in the industry. Autumn told me she loved it, and if an Oscar-winning cinematographer tells me she loved that show, I’ll take it. These things exist, and they’re always out there for people to find them.

You played a first AD in the series. How much did that role cause you to appreciate first ADs that you’ve worked with over your career?
Completely. Every single one. Nilo Otero, who’s the first AD on Chris’s movies, he’d seen The Franchise, and he was like, “You know what it’s like now.” I was like, “Nilo, I don’t think anyone knows what it’s like for you.” Of all the first AD jobs in the world, this is the most insane one. He and Chris go back years and can be like a married couple sometimes. It’s really funny. But it’s a hell of a job, one of the most important jobs on any set, anywhere, yet barely anyone knows what it is, publicly speaking. It’s a thankless task. That’s what I loved about what we were trying to do with that show — it was about those incredible people who we work with day in, day out.

In 2021, you said that leaving EastEnders was the first step in “reclaiming a sense of empowerment” for yourself in your career. What has made you feel empowered lately?
The opportunities I’ve been afforded, especially since Yesterday, have opened doors for me to be in movies like this, to lead shows like The Franchise, to be on shows like Station Eleven, to have the privilege of being nominated for an Emmy. That’s why I was fascinated to listen to Matt and Chris talking about the business. Matt, the collaboration he’s had with Ben Affleck his whole life, they understand the business. So much of Chris’s success comes down to how well he and Emma understand the machinations of the business, and therefore they can be specific about how they want to do things. I’m learning that I can use these platforms to learn more about the business and how it works, and that is going to empower me further to try and do what I see Riz and Dev doing. I know that’s where I want to go with it. There is an empowerment to being in those places and learning from the best.

In our final moments, do you want to say anything about The Odyssey that I didn’t ask about? 
It’s worth highlighting how much I admire Chris’s casting choices in this movie. I know this isn’t how he would describe it, or his intention, but it feels like a big middle finger to people who think otherwise. I’m so glad this movie exists, on many levels, and I’m still pinching myself that I’m in it. To see all those faces onscreen, to see what he’s done in that regard — I’m full of admiration for it, and I’m glad he seems to understand the world and what is needed to help us reflect the world in a modern way.

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A running gag in Bait is that Ahmed’s character, Shah, keeps getting mistaken for Dev Patel.

Nabhaan Rizwan and Himesh Patel played brothers in Station Eleven.