Travis Scott is scheduled to appear in Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated The Odyssey, and the writer-director has opened up about what the rapper’s role entails.
In an interview with Time ahead of the release of The Odyssey this summer, Nolan shared that Scott will feature in the film as a bard, a storyteller or a poet of sorts. This reveal, notably, arguably lends itself to previously shared fan theories that Scott may be playing Demodocus.
“I cast him because I wanted to nod towards the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap,” said Nolan, who previously enlisted Scott to make an original song for Tenet with composer-producer Ludwig Göransson.
In the same interview, Göransson added that he was told by Nolan to avoid using an orchestra when composing the score for the adaptation of the Homer epic. “It’s not like the orchestra existed back then,” he said. “It was a challenge and also an opening to try to make something unique.”
Scott made his feature film debut with a small cameo role in the 2019 crime drama Gully, but made his starring debut in the experimental Harmony Korine film Aggro Dr1ft, which is presented entirely in infrared photography. When a trailer for The Odyssey dropped at the start of the year, fans quickly noticed someone resembling Scott and began speculating what his role would entail.
The Odyssey is an adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek epic of the same name and is the most expensive movie of Nolan’s career, carrying a reported estimated budget of $250 million. Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film cameras, the movie will also star Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, and John Leguizamo, among others.
The Odyssey is scheduled to hit theaters on July 17.
