You Won’t Believe How They Made the Cyclops in The Odyssey (Hint: It Involved a 60-Foot Puppet)
You Won’t Believe How They Made the Cyclops in The Odyssey (Hint: It Involved a 60-Foot Puppet)
Jessica McBrideFri, August 7, 2026 at 11:30 PM UTC
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In the new Christopher Nolan movie The Odyssey, soldiers from the Greek island of Ithaca end up trapped in a cave with a terrifying, enormous creature. The blockbuster film loosely follows the legendary poem by Homer, and students of Greek history will recognize the one-eyed giant Cyclops.
Odysseus, the Greek king played by Matt Damon, who is trying to make it home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, encounters many strange creatures on his decades-long journey. However, the Cyclops stands out for his size and the frightening scene in which the soldiers slip out of the cave camouflaged as a herd of sheep as the monster sleeps.
But how was the creature created? That’s an interesting story all by itself.
A puppet and a real actor brought the Cyclops to life
According to NBC News, Nolan used a 60-foot puppet to create the Cyclops, whose formal name is Polyphemus in Greek mythology. Actor Bill Irwin, who previously played the robot in Nolan’s Interstellar, brought the Cyclops to life. The filmmakers created the fiction that the Cyclops was interacting with soldiers by also filming footage of Irwin at Nestor’s Cave, a limestone cavern with ties to ancient mythology in Messenia, Greece.
Nolan avoided using CGI or a green screen. Instead, he used animatronics, puppetry and computer graphics. He wanted the monster to have complexity and seem realistic, so it was also important to him to have a real actor play the character.
Nolan revealed that creating the Cyclops was one of the toughest things he’s done as a director.
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Nolan says he didn’t want the monster to be a cartoon
Nolan didn’t want the Cyclops to seem like a cartoon.
“Everything about the Cyclops sequence is aimed at trying to imagine: What would this be like in real life?” Nolan told Empire. “Not approaching it from a storybook or cartoony point of view, but really trying to be in there with Odysseus and his men. It’s a horrifying situation.”
Damon revealed in the interview with Empire that shooting the scene was difficult because thousands of bees hovered at the cave door. The filmmakers used 40 real sheep to film the scene, and Nolan explained that it felt more realistic to film the scene in a real cave.
Nolan told podcaster Jake Stakes that he was trying to give people a “reason to believe” the character was real. He said going to real places was key to making Cyclops come to life.
“We used every trick in the book,” Nolan said.
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Sources: -
NBC News: “How They Made the Cyclops in The Odyssey”
Huffington Post UK: “Christopher Nolan Opens Up About ‘Terrifying’ Task Of Creating The Odyssey’s Cyclops”
Empire: “The Odyssey Cyclops Scene Used 60-Foot ‘Contraption’ On Set: ‘What Would This Be Like In Real Life?’”
@jakestakes on Instagram
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
