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Travis Scott Says Christopher Nolan Called Directly to Cast Him in The Odyssey
Travis Scott says Christopher Nolan personally called him to cast him in The Odyssey, where he plays a bard singing about Odysseus.
By the time Travis Scott walked onto The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, July 21, the rapper had already found himself inside one of the summer’s stranger pop culture intersections: a Christopher Nolan film. His role in The Odyssey did not come through an agent chain or some carefully managed rollout. It started with a call from Nolan himself.
Scott told Fallon that his phone lit up with a contact saved simply as Chris, which initially led him to assume the director was reaching out about a show. “My phone went off and it just said Chris. And I’m thinking like, okay, I don’t know what this is about. Maybe he wants to go to a show,” he said.
Instead, Nolan was asking whether Scott would be interested in acting in a movie.
“I didn’t think it was for him,” Scott said. “I thought maybe he’s producing something or something. Then he’s like, ‘Well, I’m working on this movie. I haven’t really told people about it, but it’s coming out soon. And I want you to kind of be in it.’”
Scott’s first instinct was to remind the Oscar-winning filmmaker that he is, at base, a musician rather than an actor. But Nolan, according to Scott, came prepared with what he described as a “thesis” for why the Sicko Mode rapper belonged in the project. That was apparently enough to make the decision easy.
“I’m really inspired by him,” Scott told Fallon. “He’s a real mentor of mine outside of this. And so I’m like, ‘Yo, whatever you’re down with, I’m down.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Scott made clear that signing on and actually arriving on set were two very different experiences. He had expected something relatively contained, only to realize he would be working alongside Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson. That, he admitted, shifted the scale of the whole thing.
“And I don’t know what the f**k I’m doing,” he said. “But they were such amazing cast, you know? Supportive. Chris is an amazing director. Everybody made me feel comfortable. I was just glad to be there and just watch him and being in such a world of them.”
In the film, Scott plays a bard who sings about Odysseus’ victories, a part that now places him in the middle of Nolan’s mythic, star-heavy version of The Odyssey. The movie is in theaters now.
Check out the full interview below.
