In February of 2026, Elon Musk’s criticized Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey for racial reasons. The arrow missed the mark for a number of reasons besides being largely ignored by Christopher Nolan and Lupita
* The famous myth that caused the Trojan War is The Judgement of Paris, where Helen is described as extraordinarily beautiful—the woman whose beauty is central to the story and to Paris choosing her. The Greeks did not, however, define Helen as “the most beautiful woman in the world” in a way that specifies a modern racial or hair-color category.
* Blonde Helen is largely a later visual convention. Ancient Greek literature and art do not give us a simple rule that Helen must be a blonde. Homer uses beauty language and, in some passages, describes Helen with epithets associated with hair, but the surviving tradition is much more complicated than the modern Hollywood “blonde Helen” image.
* The ancient Greeks didn’t have modern racial categories. Helen is a mythological Greek woman from the Bronze Age/Mycenaean world. Nothing in the basic premise of the myth makes “white” or “blonde” a necessary characteristic.
* Casting is therefore an interpretive choice. If Nolan casts Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, the relevant question is whether the performance can convey the extraordinary beauty and status that the story attributes to Helen—not whether the actress matches a modern stereotype of what a Greek woman “should” look like.
* There is also a chronological wrinkle: the Judgement of Paris is part of the mythic tradition surrounding the Trojan War, whereas the surviving written versions of the story were recorded centuries later. Treating a single modern visual representation as if it were an unambiguous ancient historical description is misleading.
The Judgement of Paris is a little known story that imparts the wisdom of the trinity as a way to avoid polarization. For many centuries it has been a favorite of artists and representations can be found in many museums. We have a large section of our pinterest.com/carnavalbz devoted to it here:
Explore a hand-picked collection of Pins about Judgement of Paris on Pinterest.
So, if Elon Musk’s reasoning is essentially “Helen was the most beautiful woman, therefore she must have been blonde/white, therefore Lupita cannot play her,” that conclusion doesn’t follow from the myth. “Most beautiful” is a narrative characterization, not a statement. Elon Musk, like to rest of us, cannot be expected to bat 1.000 but he is writing some myths for our generation that deserve attention. MORE
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