Jon Bernthal Boards Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

If the return of Frank Castle in this week's Daredevil: Born Again trailer has had you craving more Jon Bernthal in your life, then boy do we have an eyebrow raising bit of casting news for you. Per Deadline's reporting, the star of The Punisher has become the latest acting heavyweight to board Christopher Nolan's mythic epic The Odyssey. He joins a cast whose constellational line-up now includes *deep breath* Tom Holland, Zendaya, Matt Damon, Lupita Nyong'o, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and Robert Pattinson.

Believed to be shooting as early as next month, Nolan's The Odyssey — an adaptation of Homer's epic chronicle of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, and his long and perilous journey home after the Trojan War — is already shaping up to be yet another singular cinematic event from the Oppenheimer Oscar winner. With filming scheduled to take place across the globe, a budget reportedly in The Dark Knight's heady $250m+ region, and the promise of "brand new IMAX film technology" being used to take Homer's Ancient Greek yarn and realise it anew on the biggest canvas imaginable, even the word epic sounds like something of an understatement when describing what Nolan's 13th film is aiming for. And now that Bernthal has entered the fray, a new addition to Nolan's rogues gallery, Odysseus' punishing journey has just got that extra bit more Punishing — for him at least, not us!

We don't know who exactly Bernthal is set to play in the movie, penned by Nolan himself, just yet. Nor do we know who anyone's playing for that matter just yet (the smart money suggests Damon could be Odysseus and Holland his son Telemachus, or, in a more Nolanesque move, the two could play younger and older Odysseus' even). Heck, we don't even know if Nolan's doing a straight-up adaptation of The Odyssey or whether he'll sneak in a temporal pincer movement somewhere along the line. But we do know that the film will hit IMAX screens on 17 July, 2026. Only 540 days to go...