Tom Holland calls Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey the job of a lifetime

Tom Holland has landed his first Christopher Nolan film, and he is treating it as more than another franchise detour. Playing Telemachus in The Odyssey, the Spider-Man star said the project is “the job of a lifetime” and called the screenplay “the best script I’ve ever read,” language that frames the role as a clear break from the teen and young-adult parts that made him famous.

Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is built around Matt Damon as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Benny Safdie, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo and Mia Goth in the ensemble. Universal has described the film as a mythic action epic shot across the world with brand new IMAX film technology, and it is set for theatrical release on July 17, 2026.

For Holland, the part of Telemachus carries a different weight than a superhero franchise. Telemachus is the son left behind by Odysseus, a young man defined by waiting, inheritance and the pressure of becoming someone larger than himself. That makes the character a natural bridge for Holland, who has spent much of his career in roles built around youth, speed and physical precision, but is now stepping into a period piece anchored by language, scale and legacy.

Nolan’s film is his first since Oppenheimer and his third collaboration with Damon after Interstellar and Oppenheimer. The production has been described as unusually ambitious even by Nolan standards, with the director saying IMAX would allow him to shoot intimate character scenes in ways that had not been possible before. Damon said his first reaction to the script was that many parts were impossible and challenging, a reaction that fits a production built to stretch the format rather than merely showcase it.

Filming was set to begin in spring 2025, including on Favignana in Sicily, the island colloquially known as Goat Island and linked to Odysseus’ wanderings in the original text. That choice tied the shoot to the geography of the epic itself, giving Nolan’s version a physical connection to the Mediterranean world that has long shaped the story of Ithaca, Troy and the homecoming at the center of Homer’s poem. For Holland, the appeal is not just the scale of the production but the chance to be seen in a different register, as a son on the threshold of adulthood rather than a perpetual boy in motion.