MOVIE NEWS – Christopher Nolan once again chose an in-camera solution for a spectacle that many filmmakers would largely construct with digital effects. Matt Damon has revealed that 4-foot-6 stunt performer Devyn Dalton doubled for Odysseus in selected shots involving the towering Laestrygonians.
Throughout his career, Christopher Nolan has consistently favoured physical filmmaking whenever a visual problem can be solved on set. That philosophy also shaped The Odyssey, even though adapting Homer’s epic required the production to stage enormous battles, monsters and mythological creatures on a blockbuster scale. Rather than allowing the fantastic elements to feel detached from the actors, Nolan’s team assembled an extensive practical operation designed to preserve the tangible quality associated with his films.
Matt Damon offered a glimpse at one of those methods during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. The actor explained that a female stunt performer stepped into the role of Odysseus for several carefully designed images. Cross-gender doubling is hardly unusual in film production; what made this assignment particularly useful was Dalton’s height, which became an essential part of the illusion Nolan wanted to create.
“She Had the Most Impressive Arms I’ve Ever Seen”
The sequence places Odysseus against the Laestrygonians, whose immense size had to be evident before they even began fighting. Instead of enlarging every opponent during post-production, the crew combined stunt performers over two metres tall with much shorter doubles representing the Greeks. Camera position, distance and framing exaggerated the contrast until the actors appeared to belong to entirely different scales. It is a variation on the forced-perspective techniques Peter Jackson famously used to place the hobbits alongside taller characters in The Lord of the Rings.
Dalton replaced Damon in the compositions where the giants needed to loom most dramatically above Odysseus. “My stunt double was a woman, a stuntwoman, who had the most impressive arms I’ve ever seen,” Damon recalled. He later found Dalton in the catering area, introduced himself, hugged her and thanked her for helping the sequence come together. Damon stressed that most of the arm shots in the film are still his, but whenever the scale trick depended on Dalton’s smaller frame, audiences are naturally seeing her instead. He felt that distinction deserved to be made public rather than allowing her contribution to vanish inside the finished effect.
Devyn Dalton, a Veteran of Big-Budget Productions
Dalton may only now be attracting widespread attention, but she has spent years working across major films and television series. The Vancouver-born performer moves between stunt work, acting, dance, motion capture and voice acting, supported by training in boxing, Muay Thai, fencing and sword combat. Her résumé includes more than sixty productions, among them The Last of Us, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Thunderbolts*, Godzilla, The Flash, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Arrow and several instalments of the Planet of the Apes franchise. She has also provided voice work for My Little Pony.
Speaking with CBC News, Dalton said she first learned about Damon’s remarks when friends began forwarding the interview to her. The public acknowledgement took her completely by surprise, and she was touched that he had remembered and credited her personally. She also noted that she is far from the only woman who has doubled for a male character when a scene requires a particular height, build or specialist skill. The attention allowed her to discuss the continued underrepresentation of women in stunt work and the appearance-based stereotypes they often encounter. Among the responses she valued most were messages from girls and young women who hope to enter the profession themselves.
Stunt performers have been indispensable to action filmmaking for decades, yet recognition outside the industry has remained limited. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not introduce its competitive Oscar for stunt design until 2028. Dalton’s experience is a reminder that some of cinema’s most convincing moments depend on performers whose work is successful precisely because the substitution remains invisible.
Source: 3DJuegos
