What is the most off-putting aspect of Christopher Nolan's forthcoming $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey? Is it the sandals, the boats, or the reported 172-minute runtime? If the answer is the casting of a Black actor as Helen of Troy, then you join a select group of concerned citizens including billionaire Elon Musk, right-wing influencer Tanya Bass, and podcaster Matt Walsh, who once starred in Am I Racist? (2024). These individuals are outraged, decrying Nolan's decision to cast Lupita Nyong'o as the world's most beautiful woman as cowardly and lacking integrity. Musk tweeted, "Shame on Chris Nolan for desecrating Homer. He will never live it down."
Musk's anti-desecration campaign faces a Sisyphean struggle, as they have barely recovered from Halle Bailey's The Little Mermaid (2019) and Rachel Zegler's Snow White (2025). Nyong'o's casting has ignited a firestorm of criticism. Musk blames weak directors, woke producers, and DEI hires, but he might as well blame Orson Welles, the original gangster of American movies. Welles's all-Black Depression-era production of Macbeth set the diversity ball rolling, making him either patient zero of the Woke Mind Virus or a shrewd progressive pioneer.
Welles's "Voodoo" Macbeth, as it became known, is a little-known footnote, created five years before Citizen Kane. At just 20, Welles directed a federally funded Shakespeare production in Harlem, shifting the action from Scotland to a thinly veiled Haiti. He transformed the witches into voodoo priestesses and added African drummers and dancers. Of the 150 actors, only four were professionals. Rehearsals were fractious, but eventually peace prevailed.
Nolan's critics claim Helen of Troy is "a historically white character," and casting Nyong'o amounts to "racism against white people." However, Helen was from the coast of modern-day Turkey and would not necessarily resemble past portrayals by Diane Kruger, Sienna Guillory, or Elizabeth Taylor. Moreover, she is a fictional demigod hatched from a swan's egg, open to creative licence. As Nyong'o told Elle magazine, "This is a mythological story. No one desecrates a myth; they only tell it a different way."
Was "Voodoo" Macbeth seen as racist in 1936? Welles's production reframed Scots as freed African slaves, but criticism was limited to Shakespeare purists and Harlem Communists who feared mockery. The show was a smash, with queues round the block and euphoric reviews from a mixed audience. Welles called it "my great success in my life."
Welles's racial record was inconsistent. He cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican in Touch of Evil (1958) and used bronzer for his own role as Othello (1951). Yet he pioneered "colour-conscious" casting, politicising and revitalising old stories. He desecrated sacred texts and mapped the trail for Nolan and others.
As a postscript: after Voodoo Macbeth, Welles made Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). In 1950, he stumbled into a Paris lesbian bar, saw African-American singer Eartha Kitt, and cast her as Helen of Troy in his adaptation of Dr Faustus. Thus, Nyong'o is not the first Black woman to play Helen; Kitt did so 75 years earlier, thanks to Welles.
