New Delhi: Actors Tom Holland and Matt Damon, as well as filmmaker Christopher Nolan, have landed in Mumbai for the India premiere of The Odyssey. This marks the first time an Indian city is part of the global premiere circuit alongside London, Paris and New York.
Producer Emma Thomas also arrived for premiere screenings and promotional events being held on 10-11 July at PVR ICON IMAX, Phoenix Palladium. It is the first time Nolan has had an official premiere in India.
Following videos of the Hollywood personalities at the airport and at The Taj Mahal hotel, excitement around the India premiere surged.
“A clear sign of India’s growing importance in the global theatrical business and a major moment for Indian moviegoers,” read an X post.
On Instagram, under a post announcing Damon’s arrival in India, one comment read, “Someone pinch me.”
Damon leads the cast as Odysseus, the Greek king trying to return home after the Trojan War, in Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s ancient epic. Holland plays his son Telemachus, who has grown up in his father’s absence and sets out to find him.
“The movie has so much scale,” Holland told the Associated Press, but Nolan “doesn’t sacrifice any of the heart and intimacy between our characters.”
Damon has described the production as the most demanding of his career.
“It was without question the hardest film, the most challenging, that I’ve ever done,” he told Reuters.
Damon added that Nolan used real crowds and ships rather than digital stand-ins for those sequences.
“If you see a thousand people, then there are a thousand people there. The ships, those are real ships in the background,” the actor revealed.
The 91-day production took place across six countries, with Nolan filming on real ships and on location used to recreate Odysseus’s journey home, his battles with monsters, and his encounters with the gods.
The nearly three-hour-long film also stars Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’s wife Penelope and Zendaya as the goddess Athena. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous, one of the suitors in pursuit of Penelope. The ensemble includes Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, Mia Goth, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal and Himesh Patel.
The Odyssey had its world premiere in London on 6 July, followed by a Paris premiere on 9 July. The Mumbai screenings are being held a week before the film’s worldwide theatrical release on 17 July.
Tarini Unnikrishnan is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning at ThePrint.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)