From Whangārei to Hollywood: Local actor lands role in Nolan's The Odyssey

Stephen Murphy was sitting in an office, dressed in stubbies and a faded wrestling shirt, when he realized he was auditioning for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. He didn't know it at the time. The casting director on the Zoom call had him play a sailor drowning in a storm—gasping, reaching, desperate as waves pulled him under. When it was over, Nolan himself spoke. "Fantastic work, Stephen. Really great work." Murphy's manager told him later that feedback from Nolan was almost never given. Within days, he had a plane ticket to Morocco and eight days to prepare.

The 40-year-old from Whangārei had spent years chasing this moment. As a boy in Glasgow, he'd watched Braveheart and then Gladiator, and something in those films—the scale of them, the way they told stories—had lodged itself in him. When his family moved to New Zealand when he was eight, that hunger didn't fade. He went to Tauraroa Area School, didn't make the cast of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, and kept moving. Golden Bay Cement. Then eight years in Australian mines, where he learned storytelling by watching the men around him work. A mining boss saw something in him, challenged him, believed in him. "You're a storyteller," the man said. "You're not meant to be down the hole forever." Murphy saved money and moved to Melbourne. An audition for Outlander didn't land, but the casting director told him to go bigger. "Swim with the big fish," she said. He moved to Los Angeles in 2018.

Within six months he booked his first role. But in 2022, a full quad rupture nearly ended everything. Doctors told him he would never do stunts or action films again. He refused to accept it. Three years to the day after the accident, he was on a private plane to Morocco.

Nolan had cast him as one of ten actors selected from 32,000 applicants to work alongside Matt Damon in one of the year's biggest films. In Morocco, Murphy trained for five days, then had dinner with Damon and the rest of Odysseus' men. When filming began, the bay was transformed—ships, tents, extras in armor, the whole landscape arranged to look like ancient Greece. Murphy could barely see a camera. It wasn't until he spotted cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and Nolan himself that it clicked: this was real. This was a movie.

Damon took him under his wing. They spent a month at each location learning to row and sail, circling islands off Sicily for weeks. In Greece, filming the cyclops scene, Murphy was told to stay behind while others left the cave. He stood at a wall, acting for no camera, for two days. On the third day, a producer handed him a script. "You do now," the man said when Murphy protested he had no lines. "It's very important. It's the through line." The line was about honoring the dead, about not leaving them behind—the thematic spine of what the men in the film were meant to be. "We honour our dead, Odysseus." Nolan had named him Phemius, after the bard in Homer's original poem. A storyteller. A joker. It suited him.

The final location was thirty minutes from his grandmother's house in Scotland. She'd beaten cancer. His parents had flown out to be with her. They met the crew. When shooting wrapped, Murphy was overwhelmed. He said goodbye to Nolan. Then Damon put a hand on his shoulder. "You think this is the end?" Damon said. "It's not the end. It's just the beginning." Murphy had recently finished filming Empire City with Gerard Butler in Australia, the country where his acting dream had truly begun. He wanted Northlanders to know: don't give up. In the final cut of The Odyssey, he appears more than he expected. People in the industry have told him that even when he's barely speaking, they can feel him there. Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus' son, was among those who said so.