Helen of Troy Is Obviously Not an African, but Will Woke Hollywood Make Her One?

by William Sullivan

Hollywood wokesterism for its own sake has wrecked a lot of good movies.

If Helen of Troy were meant to be an African woman, Homer might have told his readers that fact in his telling of the greatest and most timeless epic poems in Western history – The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Her appearance being so contrary to everyone else in the Greek world certainly would have warranted a mention. This much, at least, should be obvious to everyone.

Imagining Helen’s appearance to be that of an African woman is just farcical, if one has any respect for the source material at all. It would make no sense for a high-budget production to take diligent care in correctly portraying the minutiae about Greek armor, weapons, landscapes, and triremes, for example, only to say “screw it, let’s make Helen of Troy an African lady.”

But no less than famed writer/director Christopher Nolan has been accused of such absurd pandering in these past weeks. Rumors have been spreading widely and loudly that he has cast Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his new film treatment of Homer’s The Odyssey.

Now, at this point, the story has all the hallmarks of a hoax. To my knowledge, no one in the production has verified that she would be playing this role. While some actors have their parts credited already at IMDB, many others are cited as having roles in the film without citing which characters they will play. Ms. Nyong’o is among these.

It’s clear that she has been cast in the film, but it seems unlikely that she would be playing Helen. After all, Helen is not a critical player in The Odyssey – [mild spoiler alert] after having run off with her now-dead Trojan lover and fueling a decade-long war in Troy in the events that led to The Iliad, this story finds Helen older and living a life of luxury in Sparta with her husband from whom she fled, Menalaus.

Additionally, Lupita Nyong’o is a good actress whose talents are in high demand, and I doubt that her fee is justified to have her eating grapes for a moment on a chaise in a diabolical plot to own the trads or something. Helen’s role in the story is a bit part, at best – but she’s critical enough a character in the central story to have sparked a firestorm of controversy that highlights the cultural divide in the Western world today.

Again, it makes absolutely no sense to cast an African as the woman who was widely perceived across the known Greek world as the defining model of beauty. Nyong’o is beautiful, of course, but not in the style of classical Greece with its paragons of different characteristics. It would be a decision so absurd that it could only be made as a conscious effort to take a sledgehammer to the edifice of truth and Western culture, and to also rub a thumb in the eye of the American audiences who are tired of all this nonsense.

The examples of filmmakers having done this are too numerous to count here, but suffice to say that when AMC chose to race-swap Henry VIII’s wife, a very real white woman named Anne Boleyn, as a black woman, audiences who value truth and immersive storytelling came to understand that there are no limits to the depths of absurdity that filmmakers are willing to plumb in order to get their imaginative wokeness on the screen.