Spoilers follow for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Matt Damon’s arms get plenty of screen time in The Odyssey, but one memorable sequence comes with a small and very muscular caveat: The Odyssey stunt double standing in for him was a woman Damon says had “the greatest arms I’ve ever seen.” Credit, as ever, goes where the biceps actually were.

How Nolan staged the Laestrygonians scene

The film, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, adapts Homer’s ancient Greek poem, where the Laestrygonians are a tribe of giant cannibals who devour members of Odysseus’ crew. Nolan’s version gives them a different visual language: towering, armored figures who look closer to medieval knights, complete with swords.

In the scene, Odysseus and his men encounter the giants, quickly understand that diplomacy is not about to save them, and flee toward their boats. The escape turns into a slaughter as the Laestrygonians cut down many of Odysseus’ soldiers.

Nolan’s practical-effects streak shows here, too: the sequence relies on bodies, blocking, and forced perspective instead of outsourcing the whole thing to CGI.

Why Damon was replaced in some shots

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Damon explained that Nolan’s team used forced perspective to make the giants appear massive beside Odysseus and his crew.

Damon said the team cast seven-foot stunt performers as the Laestrygonians. For the soldiers, the team brought in stunt performers under five feet tall to sell the scale difference on camera.

That meant Damon himself could not appear in every shot where Odysseus needed to look small next to the giants. For those specific forced-perspective moments, his double was a female stunt performer.

“When we did the forced perspective stuff of the Laestrygonians, I don’t know if there’s been a thing about how we did it, but there were these stunt men who were all seven feet,” Damon said. “And then they got stunt men who were under five feet. So my double was a woman, a female stunt performer who had the greatest arms I’ve ever seen.”

He said he made a point of thanking her when he first saw her off set.

“And when she came into the catering tent, it was the first time I saw her, I went up and I hugged her and I thanked her for all the work that she’d put in,” Damon said.

He added: “And so those shots in the movie where you see these giants looming over me… so it was almost 100% my arms in the movie. Gotta give it up where it’s due.”

Damon’s training pushed him back to high school weight

Damon, 55, has also said the role required serious physical work, including slimming down to a weight he had not seen since high school.

On a recent episode of New Heights with Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce, Damon said Nolan wanted a very specific look for Odysseus.

“I had a beard like yours for like a year,” Damon said. “I was in really good shape. I lost a lot of weight. [Nolan] wanted me lean but strong.”

He also credited a strict diet and a medical change with helping him get there.

“Just because of this other thing that I did with my doctor, I stopped eating gluten,” Damon said. “I used to walk around at between 185 and 200, and I did that whole movie at 167. And I haven’t been that light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a really strict diet.”

Why the practical approach matters

The detail is funny on the surface, mostly because movie-star arm discourse has apparently become a team sport. But it also points to how Nolan built the scene: by combining carefully chosen performers, forced perspective, and physical staging to make the danger feel tangible.

That matters for a sequence built around scale. The Laestrygonians need to look impossibly large, while Odysseus and his men need to look suddenly, terrifyingly human. A digital shortcut could have handled that. Instead, the production found seven-foot giants, sub-five-foot soldiers, and one stunt performer with arms memorable enough that Damon is still publicly giving her credit.

The film has also drawn attention for its record-breaking box office opening and for reactions from Greek translators who have seen Nolan’s take on Homer. IGN’s review gave The Odyssey an 8/10, calling it an adaptation that brings “a sense of horror and existential angst to the story” along with some humor, and describing it as “a pretty great moviegoing experience” even if not a perfect one.