The Ben Shapiro Show - July 08, 2026


Nobody's Allowed to Notice Anything About Elliot Page

Topics
casting controversies Elliot Page casting in The Odyssey
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Elliot Page Odyssey Ellen Page Snow White Elijah Wood Matt Damon Homer Wandering Asian Girl George Murison Lupita Nyongo Lapita Yongo Cassandra Odysseus Tall Hera Zeus
Iran Threatened My Life. Here's My Response Mickey Mouse 'Blackface' Is Why Trump Needs To Fix The Smithsonian

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

193.31

Word count

1,685

Sentence count

116

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Elliot Page has been cast in the new film, The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matt Damon and Amy Poehler. There's a lot of controversy surrounding this casting, and I'm here to talk about it.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This week, Ellen Page in a suit, Elliot Page in a suit, walked the red carpet in London for the premiere of The Odyssey.
00:00:06.000 Elliot Page was cast as a soldier in the Trojan War.
00:00:09.000 Here's the thing you're supposed to do applaud, say nothing, not along.
00:00:12.000 Well, I want to talk about when exactly that happened.
00:00:15.000 When did we go from a culture that debated these questions to a culture where even noticing basic things is treated like bigotry?
00:00:21.000 That is the actual story here.
00:00:22.000 Not one premiere, but the rule that you're supposed to pretend a thing that is clearly happening is not happening.
00:00:27.000 Here's the thing all this controversy about The Odyssey, there are a lot of people online who are like, this is going to destroy The Odyssey at the box office.
00:00:35.000 It will not.
00:00:36.000 It will not.
00:00:36.000 Nolan's films are event movies.
00:00:38.000 The politics are secondary to the vast majority of people who are watching movies like The Odyssey.
00:00:44.000 It's tracking right now for a domestic opening weekend between $100 and $120 million.
00:00:49.000 It could do $220 to $250 million worldwide, which would put in like Project Hail Mary territory.
00:00:55.000 And the word of mouth, I'm sure, if it's good, will be exceptional.
00:00:58.000 All the theaters are already sold out.
00:01:01.000 Amazing pre sales, obviously, higher ticket prices because of the IMAX of the film.
00:01:06.000 It's always kind of interesting to see which controversies bleed over into real life and which just sort of stay online.
00:01:11.000 I feel like this one is mostly going to stay online.
00:01:13.000 And the reason that I think it's mostly going to stay online, again, is because it is not an overt political controversy.
00:01:19.000 Basically, casting controversies tend to not really have a major impact.
00:01:23.000 It tends to be plotting controversies, maybe full scale sucker punch controversies.
00:01:29.000 So when Snow White, Disney's Snow White, was set to premiere and the original version of Snow White, Was set to make it a sort of woke fantasy that was focused in on dwarves, were not dwarves, they're actually tall.
00:01:43.000 And it just felt like a fundamental betrayal of the storyline.
00:01:45.000 There's no real indicator from the trailers at this point that the Odyssey is a fundamental betrayal of the storyline.
00:01:51.000 I know there are a lot of people talking about the translation that was used by Nolan in the Odyssey because there are a bunch of translations.
00:01:56.000 He used sort of the newest and most feminist leaning one.
00:02:00.000 But I think people are going to wait to see it and see if the themes are actually embedded there.
00:02:03.000 Again, it's not as though Nolan hasn't had some politics in his films.
00:02:06.000 I mean, Oppenheimer is a.
00:02:09.000 Liberal leaning film for sure, because Oppenheimer was pretty clearly a commie, but the entire movie is based around the idea that he was not and that he was somehow the unsung hero and all of this.
00:02:20.000 With that said, Nolan does have a gift for being able to strip politics out of his films almost entirely.
00:02:26.000 And I have a feeling that this movie is going to perform really, really well.
00:02:29.000 I just don't think this bleeds over into regular life in the way that so many people in the online world seem to think that it will.
00:02:34.000 So here's my deal I will get hot and bothered about The Odyssey once I see it.
00:02:39.000 But playing this game where I get extremely, extremely upset about the Odyssey before I actually see it, I'm just, eh, eh.
00:02:48.000 Do I think that they could have cast somebody who is not Lapiti Yongo as Helen?
00:02:53.000 Sure.
00:02:54.000 Am I wildly bothered by this?
00:02:56.000 Not particularly, given the fact that pretty much no one in the movie is Greek.
00:03:00.000 Matt Damon is playing Odysseus.
00:03:01.000 Matt Damon is of, what, Scotch Irish extraction or something? 0.99
00:03:05.000 He certainly is not Greek.
00:03:07.000 In fact, none of the people in the movie, so far as I'm aware, are Greek. 0.63
00:03:11.000 So there's that.
00:03:12.000 Now, is it more of a leap to Lapita Yongo for Helen?
00:03:17.000 Is it something that, like, breaks me?
00:03:17.000 Sure.
00:03:19.000 Not particularly much. 1.00
00:03:21.000 Ellen Page is a bit of a different story. 0.98
00:03:22.000 This is ridiculous. 1.00
00:03:23.000 Casting Ellen Page as a man in The Odyssey is incredibly stupid. 1.00
00:03:27.000 It is just a dumb, kind of woke acknowledgement. 1.00
00:03:30.000 I'm not going to judge the entire movie by that because, again, it's an entire movie and we'll see how it plays out. 1.00
00:03:35.000 But it is indeed stupid casting. 0.99
00:03:38.000 It's kind of hilarious to, and sad, honestly, because, you know, Ellen Page is obviously a person with great mental disturbance. 1.00
00:03:45.000 That is the only thing that can explain why you would mutilate your body and call yourself Elliot.
00:03:50.000 And Ellen Page has been trying to, or Elliot Page, has been trying to bring herself off as sort of a virile and masculine man. 0.91
00:03:58.000 And that's why the other day she released footage of herself boxing.
00:04:02.000 And Elliot Page is about five foot three and weighs maybe 105 pounds, which means that my 12 year old daughter could probably destroy her in a fight.
00:04:14.000 It's like that.
00:04:16.000 But the picture released is supposed to, what did she find?
00:04:20.000 The shortest person she knew to stand.
00:04:21.000 And again, I'm not Captain Tall over here.
00:04:24.000 I'm five foot nine, but I would dwarf Elliot Page because I'm a normal sized human male.
00:04:29.000 In any case, this was made perfectly obvious when Elliot Page was spotted coming out of a hotel, apparently next to George Murison.
00:04:42.000 Her security guy is probably, I don't know, six foot three, six foot four, and looks like he is eight foot nine.
00:04:50.000 And Elliot Page walks out looking very much like a woman wearing a man suit.
00:04:56.000 And she is a tiny, tiny human.
00:04:58.000 And it looks as though the security guard is going to prop her on his knee and use her as a ventriloquist dummy.
00:05:04.000 I mean, it is.
00:05:07.000 That is a tiny human being. 1.00
00:05:09.000 And again, as a female, that's called normal. 0.97
00:05:13.000 But the idea that this is like a virile, masculine man, we're all supposed to pretend that Elliot Page is a man, is really, really silly.
00:05:19.000 And bad casting decision there by Nolan.
00:05:21.000 I don't understand it.
00:05:22.000 It makes no sense to me.
00:05:23.000 We'll have to see how it plays out in the film.
00:05:26.000 But.
00:05:28.000 It's definitely bizarre because, again, every so often, reality sort of peeks through.
00:05:32.000 So, if you just saw the picture of Elliot Page next to the short man in the boxing ring, you would say, oh, like a normal looking male.
00:05:40.000 And it turns out that actually Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings is not three foot six.
00:05:47.000 It turns out that Elijah Wood is like a normal sized human, maybe slightly short.
00:05:52.000 Well, perspective can play a lot of tricks on you.
00:05:55.000 And Elliot Page is actually a very, very small human, a very, very small woman.
00:06:00.000 And that is not the only controversy surrounding the release of the Odyssey.
00:06:05.000 Lapita Nyongo was asked what question she would ask Homer. 0.98
00:06:11.000 And she then dropped one of the most ignorant and stupid things I've heard about literature in quite a while, which is saying a lot. 0.97
00:06:20.000 I'd be like, so, Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them? 0.99
00:06:30.000 Okay. 0.96
00:06:31.000 And then do you lean forward and look at him like that?
00:06:34.000 Yes, like, hmm?
00:06:36.000 Remember us?
00:06:39.000 Oh, good lord.
00:06:40.000 Have you not?
00:06:41.000 Tell me you haven't read the Odyssey without telling me that you haven't read the Odyssey.
00:06:46.000 At this point, I would refer to a tweet by an account called Wandering Asian Girl who points out Did we read the same epic? 0.74
00:06:53.000 Helen starts a war.
00:06:55.000 Athena outplays gods and heroes alike.
00:06:56.000 Penelope humiliates an entire houseful of suitors for years. 0.99
00:06:59.000 Cersei turns grown men into pigs. 0.97
00:07:01.000 Calypso keeps the hero stranded for seven years. 1.00
00:07:03.000 Cassandra knows the future while everyone else plays the fool.
00:07:07.000 Nausicaa rescues the hero when he washes ashore, naked and helpless.
00:07:10.000 Andromache delivers one of the greatest anti war speeches ever written.
00:07:13.000 Hecuba becomes the face of war's devastation.
00:07:15.000 Aphrodite, Hera, and Thetis literally influence the fate of nations and the decisions of Zeus himself.
00:07:20.000 But sure, maybe Homer just forgot about women. 1.00
00:07:25.000 That is some of the stupidest nonsense. 1.00
00:07:28.000 You know what that is? 1.00
00:07:30.000 You know what that is?
00:07:31.000 She definitely did not read the book.
00:07:32.000 And now she's going to go to sort of the stock woke response to any question.
00:07:37.000 Because if you ask somebody who's not read the book about a book that was written hundreds or thousands of years ago, the first thing you're going to do, just the safe answer always is, it was kind of sexist, wasn't it?
00:07:46.000 Because it turns out that, you know, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, a lot of ancient literature does not focus on the ladies.
00:07:53.000 But she picked the one piece of ancient literature that actually focuses quite a bit on the ladies.
00:07:58.000 So oops, oops, insert LeBron meme reading the first page of every book.
00:08:05.000 Guys, don't do this.
00:08:06.000 Don't do this. 1.00
00:08:07.000 Don't let the wokeness overcome your ability to read basic. 0.56
00:08:10.000 Like, didn't you go to high school? 1.00
00:08:11.000 We all read Homer in high school, didn't we?
00:08:13.000 I feel like we did.
00:08:14.000 Okay.
00:08:14.000 As far as the movie itself, I will wait.
00:08:17.000 I will hold.
00:08:17.000 I don't like reviewing movies I haven't seen.
00:08:19.000 But sometimes they surprise me.
00:08:21.000 So I will hold my review.
00:08:23.000 But I will say again bad piece of casting in Elliott Page as a dude because that's a bad piece of casting in real life.
00:08:29.000 And also, I don't need lectures from Lapita Nyongo about feminism in Homer or some such nonsense.
00:08:34.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:08:36.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:37.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.