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Why does Odysseus have a Boston accent?

The American accents in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey have a lot to tell us about power.

After the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s new film adaptation of The Odyssey dropped, a wave of conversation followed, part amused, part outraged: Why were all the actors, even the British ones, doing American accents? And why did the dialogue sound so contemporary?

“My dad is coming home,” declares Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, with tight-mouthed American vowels despite Holland’s natural English accent.

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“You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know,” returns Robert Pattinson, another British actor hitting hard American r’s.

“Let’s gooooooo!” yells Matt Damon’s Odysseus as he leads his men to battle, Boston o’s in their full splendor.

“Dude,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. “Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.” The comments section below the trailer is filled with jokes about seeing Odysseus waiting outside Starbucks.

It makes sense that audiences were so surprised at Nolan’s choice. We’re used to seeing actors in period pieces and fantasy epics speak with British accents, a trope sometimes called “The Queen’s Latin.” But there’s no logical reason that characters who, in-universe, are speaking ancient Greek should sound to us like they’re talking in mannered BBC English, says Erik Singer, the dialect coach who helped Austin Butler nail his Elvis accent. The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old, and on that scale, contemporary American English is just as close to Homer’s language as the elevated old-timey English diction we often see in period films.

“Accents do not in fact inherently mean anything,” Singer says, “but we really think that they do.”

To understand why the accents in The Odyssey sound so strange to so many people, you first have to understand why British accents became the default for any period piece. The answer has a surprising amount to do with what American audiences think power sounds........

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