Ellen Mirojnick Talks ‘The Odyssey’ Costume Design Approach

In “The Odyssey,” it takes Odysseus 10 years to make it home after the Trojan War. For costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, her journey with Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation was much shorter, but no less epic.

It was less than two years ago — September 2024 — when Nolan and his producer-wife Emma Thomas called Mirojnick about the film, which follows their collaboration on “Oppenheimer.” “I hadn’t seen them in a bit,” says Mirojnick. “He put down the script, and it was ‘The Odyssey.’”

A few hours later, Mirojnick had an understanding of Nolan’s vision for the film, which was just about to be greenlit for production.

“Knowing what Chris has done over the course of his filmmaking career, it was clear that he was very intent on the idea of realism, and not fantasy,” Mirojnick says. “Once that word ‘realism’ comes down, it changes the game entirely,” she adds. “It sets the tone of the film in a way that is quite challenging, and quite exhilarating at the same time.”

Unlike “Oppenheimer,” “The Odyssey” wasn’t meant to be a period piece; although there is an awareness of when the story is taking place, it doesn’t live within a specific historical period. “The process was from the inside out,” says Mirojnick. “I began with the text, then I moved through history, and wound up in myth.” 

Committing to the idea of myth, she instead focused on conveying the “timeless” feeling and emotion of the characters, imbued with the “essence” of the ancient time period. “You’re not doing a museum-worthy representation, but an interpretation of the text,” she adds. “ You create a new mythology that’s based in reality.”

And at the root of that myth: Odysseus. 

“ What makes him compelling from a costume perspective is that he’s never static,” she says of the story’s hero, portrayed onscreen by Matt Damon. “Most epic heroes arrive and they’re done. They’re visually complete. But Odysseus deteriorates, he reconstructs, he disguises, he adapts, he transforms, and he survives.  So his costume language therefore had to become evolutionary, without you actually noticing.”

The design challenge for Mirojnick was to allow audiences to feel Odysseus’ erosion over the course of his journey, without losing the core of what defined him. She sums up her overall approach with a surprising word given the complexity of his voyage: simplicity.

“ What that simplicity enabled me to do was actually create a silhouette that could become anything,” she says. “ The combination of leather and bronze and linen enabled us to create many different silhouettes and shapes with those fabrics. We see the strength and his vulnerability, his weaknesses and his deterioration — particularly when the armor comes off.”

For “The Odyssey,” Mirojnick had to dress armies of men — both for active battle and for the suitors waiting to wed Penelope in Odysseus’ absence back in Ithaca — along with a lineup of goddesses including Athena, Calypso and Circe. 

“ The one thing that [Nolan] was very clear about in these ‘goddesses,’ is that they are independent,” says Mirojnick. “They live in a human world taking care of themselves, and they must be self-sufficient.”

For Athena, portrayed by Zendaya with little dialogue throughout the film, she wanted to convey a sense of strategy and intelligence. “She’s the unseen hand through this,” says Mirojnick. Athena’s costumes were fabricated in linen, with layers “that we could make into any different form depending on the world that she entered,” she adds. “Every bit of the draping could be done in a way to make you feel, more than looking.”

Back in Ithaca, Mirojnick also focused on draping for Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway. She didn’t want the queen’s design language to rely on spectacle, “because she is a very quiet strategist,” says Mirojnick. “ She’s not moving in the way that the others physically move. She’s a still, strategic, very powerful woman who has a plan — and you’re never to know what that plan is.”

“Restraint” — and again, simplicity — defined Mirojnick’s vision for Penelope’s wardrobe, through which she hoped to convey a sense of memory, ritual, control, and passage of time. The character wears the jewel-tone colors reflecting the House of Ithaca, often rendered in dual tones. “Her relationship to fabric was sacred, because she sits at the loom. There is a power, but a very quiet power, that we needed to relay, and so we did it through texture and draping.”

For one of the pivotal final scenes, when Penelope offers to marry any suitor able to string Odysseus’ bow and fire an arrow through a precise target, Mirojnick designed a teal dress with a tight silhouette that reflected the character’s strategic resolve. “Her collar is protective. Her draping is very precise. It is her armor,” adds Mirojnick.

The hall of suitors was outfitted with a “collage” of men who traveled from all over to win Penelope’s hand in marriage. And the most distinct of them is Antinous, the film’s villain, played by Robert Pattinson. “ Working with Robert is such a joy, and he always brings so much to the table in hopes of creating his character immediately,” says Mirojnick. 

“ [Antinous] indulged himself in excess and in want, and in deserving and taking,” she continues. “And so ‘excess’ was the root word that we used in designing all of the suitors. It was a time that was to become dark very soon.”

Stretching across settings and characters — land and sea; god and human — Mirojnick likened her process to designing for “seven different films.” The film shot in various rugged and isolated locations — a challenge that ultimately worked in favor of the costume design, which was mostly done on-site and over the course of production. 

“We wanted to have things that felt like they were just ripped from the earth,” says Mirojnick, who hired a crew of cutters, fitters, and makers for each of their different filming locations. “ We did everything on location with very little resources. So the challenge was enormous, but so gratifying and so fulfilling,” she adds. “It still just boggles my mind. I look at the film and go, ‘this is like a fever dream.’”

While all of Penelope’s suitors linger in Ithaca hoping to marry Penelope, Mirojnick’s hope is that she was able to marry the magnitude of “The Odyssey” with a sense of intimacy. And if viewers don’t register the costumes, even better. 

“ My goal is for you not to notice the costumes within this landscape, which is so powerful on so many different levels,” she adds. “I’ve seen the film now twice, and I don’t really think that you notice the costumes that much. And I’m very pleased about that.”