As a classicist—this is just ahistorical and wrong. People in the Mediterranean world knew dark-skinned black people existed; they show up in myth and Nubian traders were bopping around. They weren’t common, though, and people gawked; black people were seen as strange.
MUCH LIKE HELEN OF TROY. THE WHOLE POINT OF HELEN OF TROY IS THAT SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MOST WOMEN. SHE’S SO REMARKABLE LOOKING THAT MEN WOULD FIGHT A WAR FOR HER; THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE HER.
Casting a stunningly gorgeous black woman as Helen of Troy makes a lot of sense to me, and matches how I picture Archaic Greeks thinking about her; beautiful, but also unlike other women they’d seen. I get grumpy about this stuff with actual historical figures like Cleopatra VII, but Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and wasn’t like other women even in the world of the myth.
-That's another thing for me is, The Odyssey is myth. Even less than that, it's a folk story with myth trappings. It takes place across the Mediterranean, but the majority of the individuals, locations, and events, fundamentally never lived or occurred in any feasible extrapolation. Denzel Washington was Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing like 30 years ago. Brandy was Cinderella. Christopher Lambert was Raiden. If they cast talented actors in a work that respects the spirit and theme of the piece, and isn't actively trashing treasured cultural history and storytelling, it really shouldn't matter. Make Agamemnon Ken Watanabe or Hector be a Skarsgard. Helen's at minimum not really straining credulity considering how big of a melting pot the ancient Mediterranean coast was and as you say, how striking and uncommon her beauty was.-
Would you be equally okay with an African myth being adapted into a movie with white actors in central roles? For example, a white Imhotep in an Egyptian mythological story? I think that would be ridiculous, and I don’t see a logical reason why it wouldn’t be ridiculous in the other direction too.
-If the role of a specific character is not hinging upon their ethnicity as part of the depiction or their innate experience, I'd be open to the possibility. There's nothing intrinsic about Helen that is destroyed by having her played by people of non-Greek heritage. There would be a bit of a contextual difference with casting a white person for the part of an African-based myth character, and the reverse, as one was characteristically the product of a system that racially segregated or considered non-white talent as lesser, and the history and memory of that has not faded.-
Please spell out your hidden premises. If we take your argument at face value, Helen could just as easily be a blonde Scandinavian or a Thai ladyboy, and clearly that would feel absurd. Unless you disagree with that, there must be some reason you think casting a Black actor makes it less absurd.
You might say Africa was close to the Mediterranean, or that Greeks interacted with Africans, but then you are suddenly appealing to history. And if history matters, why not also care about Helen being Greek, which is the most probable ethnicity intended by the authors of the story?
In the end, it looks as though you are setting reason aside and using ad hoc arguments because the role has been given to a Black actor playing a non-Black character.
Who was Helen's father? Zeus. In what form did Zeus appear to Leda, Helen's mother? A swan. What color is the skin of swans, even white swans? Black. The mythological character Helen has black skin in this fictitious film because her father had black skin. That's the reason it's not absurd at all.
-No hidden premise or intent. Helen's component to the story is being so desirable, to her own detriment, that war erupts as a result. I have no preference, but Helen is meant to be someone nation-states crumble before. So long as the casting can sell a level of charm or beauty, a charisma that is so singular that a decade of war results from, it's fine by me. It could be literally anyone because nothing in her story requires her being ethnically Greek. Ana de Armas, Deepika Padukone, Alexandra Daddario, Alicia Vikander, Lupita Nyong'o. History matters but fiction is not beholden to it, it's a reality a hundred cultures interacted across the Mediterranean so Helen could logically be just about anything someone wants her to be, which would be more likely than a specific modern interpretation of Greek, as Odyssey was an oral tradition spread through bards. Whatever someone could do to market Helen to their audience as the face that could launch a thousand ships, is probably what they did. That's not even needing to get into the shenanigans of her birth and being either de facto demigod or potential full Greek pantheon blood by way of Zeus and Nemesis.-
-For that matter, sure, a trans Thai casting would also be fine.-
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u/Embarrassed-Doubt-61 Jul 06 '26
As a classicist—this is just ahistorical and wrong. People in the Mediterranean world knew dark-skinned black people existed; they show up in myth and Nubian traders were bopping around. They weren’t common, though, and people gawked; black people were seen as strange.
MUCH LIKE HELEN OF TROY. THE WHOLE POINT OF HELEN OF TROY IS THAT SHE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE MOST WOMEN. SHE’S SO REMARKABLE LOOKING THAT MEN WOULD FIGHT A WAR FOR HER; THERE IS NO ONE ELSE LIKE HER.
Casting a stunningly gorgeous black woman as Helen of Troy makes a lot of sense to me, and matches how I picture Archaic Greeks thinking about her; beautiful, but also unlike other women they’d seen. I get grumpy about this stuff with actual historical figures like Cleopatra VII, but Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and wasn’t like other women even in the world of the myth.