Over the weekend, an online rumour said Elliot Page might play Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey, adding another layer to the feverish attention already surrounding the cast. Page has been described in the discussion as trans actor Elliot formerly Ellen Page, but the role remains only rumoured, not confirmed.

The casting chatter landed after last week’s trailer featured Tom Holland pouting, “My dad is coming home!” as Odysseus’s son Telemachus. That line gave the film its newest headline moment, but it was the rumoured roles around it that kept driving the conversation, including earlier alarm over non-white actors playing Greek characters and the separate rumour that Lupita Nyong’o had been cast as Helen of Troy. Elon Musk was reported to have been incensed by that rumoured casting, turning a film reveal into another round of online argument.

Nolan has already signalled his preference for Emily Wilson’s version of The Odyssey, and that matters because Wilson opened her 2018 translation by denouncing “the gendered metaphor of the ‘faithful’ translation”. It is a useful clue to how this adaptation may be approaching the source material: less as museum-piece reverence than as a fresh reading that invites, and appears to expect, debate.

Achilles himself is not just a warrior at the center of one version of the story; he appears among the ghosts in The Odyssey, where his shade tells Odysseus, “I would rather be a serf and till a poor man’s field,” “than rule among all the dead in their decay.” That passage sits uneasily beside the online uproar over who should play whom, because the poem Nolan is drawing from already treats the heroics of Greek myth as something darker, stranger and less fixed than the casting arguments suggest.

The tension is that the loudest reaction has focused on appearance and identity, while the film’s own references point in the opposite direction: a story about death, regret and voices that do not stay neatly in their expected places. For now, Page is still only rumoured as Achilles, and the latest wave of speculation says as much about the audience around Nolan’s film as it does about the film itself.