Long before Samantha Morton played the sorceress Circe in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, she was performing a famous stage illusion as a teenage magician’s assistant.
Morton joined Nottingham’s Central Junior Television Workshop in her early teens and accepted the unusual job after a friend connected to Britain’s Magic Circle lost his regular assistant. She would pose as an unsuspecting audience member before being invited onstage to take part in the performance.
Decades later, Morton returned to a story built around magic and transformation for Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic. Her relatively brief appearance as Circe became one of the film’s most discussed performances after the crew applauded her following one take.
Nolan later said producer Emma Thomas remembered the last comparable reaction occurring during Heath Ledger’s work as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Morton Learned the Metamorphosis Illusion as a Teenager
Morton told Entertainment Weekly that she worked with the magician until she was 16. “I would be a plant in the audience and then would feign innocence,” she recalled.
Her most demanding assignment was the Pendragon trick, also known as Metamorphosis. The illusion involves one performer being tied up and placed inside a locked trunk before apparently exchanging places with a second performer.
Morton’s childhood training as a dancer and gymnast helped her learn the physically demanding routine. A car accident ended her gymnastics training when she was 12, but she said she was still able to use some of the contortion skills she had developed.
The experience later made her particularly eager to audition for Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige, which centers on rival magicians. Morton said she repeatedly reminded her agent that she had worked as a magician’s assistant “for real,” although she was not cast in the film.
Nolan’s Script Changed Her View of Circe
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Morton had not read Homer’s The Odyssey before casting director John Papsidera contacted her about meeting Nolan. She said she began sobbing while reading the screenplay and rejected the idea that Circe should be approached as a straightforward villain.
In the film, Matt Damon’s Odysseus and his soldiers arrive on Circe’s island while searching for food. The sequence moves into horror as the men eat cursed food and are transformed into swine, with practical effects contributing to the physical changes around Morton.
Nolan’s version gives Circe a fear rooted in what soldiers have done to women during war. Believing that Odysseus’ men may harm her, she turns them into the beasts she already believes them to be.
“I didn’t perceive her as a villain,” Morton said. She connected the character’s experiences to women across different generations, describing Circe as someone she could recognize in the stories of her mother, sister, daughter and grandmother.
One Take Prompted an Unusual Reaction From the Crew
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Nolan told the Los Angeles Times that “the crew gave her a round of applause” after one of Morton’s takes. He later discussed the reaction with Thomas, who remembered something similar happening during Ledger’s work on The Dark Knight.
Morton told People that hearing her performance mentioned alongside Ledger’s was “very emotional.” She had spent time with the late actor and nearly appeared with him and Damon in Terry Gilliam’s 2005 film The Brothers Grimm.
Morton said calling herself a fan did not fully describe her admiration for Ledger. She praised his Joker as vulnerable and multidimensional and called the comparison “an honor.”
The Circe sequence was filmed in Scotland, where Morton has family and ancestral connections. She recalled that the demanding practical work, the confined set and the absence of interruptions all aligned during the applauded take, describing it as “true movie magic.”