Matt Damon’s female stunt double helped make Odysseus look convincingly small beside the Laestrygonians in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Damon has now praised the unnamed performer’s remarkable arms, but the film’s published credits do not clearly identify her. She helped sell one of the production’s most human-made illusions, then disappeared into the large and complicated machinery of a $250 million epic.

During an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Damon explained how Nolan’s team created the Laestrygonians, the giant warriors who menace Odysseus. Instead of relying entirely on digital effects, the production used forced perspective and performers with dramatically different heights.

“When we did the forced perspective stuff of the Laestrygonians, there were these stunt men who were all seven feet,” Damon said. The crew then paired them with stunt performers under five feet, making the height difference appear even more extreme on camera.

How the Laestrygonian illusion worked

Damon’s scene-specific double was a woman whose physique made an immediate impression. He described her as “a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I’ve ever seen.”

The actor recalled meeting her in the catering tent during filming. He hugged her and thanked her for the work she had put into the sequence. That gratitude matters because audiences rarely know which body belongs to which performer once a complicated action scene reaches the screen.

“There are those shots in the movie where you see these giants looming over me,” Damon said. “And so it was almost 100 percent my arms in the movie, but you gotta give it up where it’s due.”

The method relied on a basic visual principle: position very tall performers closer to the camera and much shorter doubles farther away, then align the shot so they appear to share the same space. The result makes the giants seem enormous without requiring every inch of the frame to be digitally constructed. The future of giant-making, apparently, still involves careful blocking and a useful height chart.

Why the stunt performer’s identity remains unclear

Female First, AsiaOne and Detik all reported Damon’s account from the podcast, but none named the stuntwoman. Published credits available through Metacritic list David Caldera and Eduardo Gago Muñoz as Damon’s stunt doubles, while several women appear more generally as stunt performers.

That does not disprove Damon’s story. Large productions often use different doubles for specific shots, and some contributions may not be described precisely in public credit listings. The woman could have been a scene-specific or uncredited double rather than Damon’s principal stand-in.

Still, the gap is telling. Damon gave her unusually direct public praise, yet viewers cannot easily connect that work to a name. Stunt performers routinely provide the physical detail that makes danger, scale and vulnerability believable. In this case, the audience sees Odysseus dwarfed by giants, while the performer helping create that vulnerability remains out of view in more ways than one.

Old camera tricks met new IMAX technology

The forced-perspective sequence also captures the unusual technical balance behind The Odyssey. Nolan combined an old practical effect with a production built around new IMAX engineering.

According to the Associated Press, the film was the first narrative feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras. Quieter camera technology allowed Nolan to record dialogue as well as large action sequences in the format, removing one of the practical obstacles that had previously limited its use. Nolan said filming an entire feature in IMAX fulfilled a goal he had held since he was 16.

Only 41 theaters could show the movie in IMAX 70mm during its opening weekend, but those locations generated $6.3 million. Across all IMAX screens, the film earned $52 million worldwide, accounting for about 20 percent of its global debut. IMAX called it the biggest worldwide opening in comparable markets in the company’s history.

IMAX chief executive Rich Gelfond told the Associated Press that Nolan “is a director who’s a star as much as any movie star in front of the camera.” The numbers support the point, although Damon’s account shows that the spectacle still depended on performers whose names were far less prominent.

The Odyssey opened with blockbuster numbers

Released July 17, The Odyssey earned an estimated $263.8 million worldwide during its opening weekend after final tracking adjusted an earlier $264.1 million estimate slightly downward. That total included:

  • $123.5 million in domestic ticket sales
  • $140.3 million from international markets
  • $52 million from IMAX screenings worldwide

The Associated Press reported a production budget of $250 million, placing the film among the most expensive R-rated releases ever made.

Based on Homer’s ancient Greek poem, the story follows King Odysseus on his dangerous journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Damon plays the wandering king, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as their son, Telemachus.

The ensemble also includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, John Leguizamo, Elliot Page, Mia Goth, Corey Hawkins, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, Travis Scott and Benny Safdie.

For all that star power and technical ambition, one of the film’s memorable scale effects came down to a very tall group of men, a very short stuntwoman and a camera placed in exactly the right spot. Damon made sure her contribution was acknowledged. A name would complete the gesture.