Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is in theatres now and it’s really something. Nearly three hours, shot on IMAX film across Greece, Sicily, Iceland, Morocco, and Scotland, with a cast that has no business being this good. We saw it last week and couldn’t quite stop thinking about it.
The Odyssey is a story about a legendary figure who leaves at the height of his powers, the people who hold things together in his absence and the ones who eventually have to carry that legacy forward without him. If you watch Edmonton Oilers hockey, you’ve been living inside that story for 40 years.
So we matched them up. Here’s which Oilers legend we think would be the best fit for each of the main characters in The Odyssey:
Wayne Gretzky as Odysseus
We see Nolan’s Odysseus as a man who has been through 20 years of war and disaster at sea and shows up home looking like a stranger. He gets back to Ithaca in disguise, worn down, and has to figure out whether what he left behind is still there. He is the most gifted person in the story, and that gift hasn’t protected him from much.
Wayne Gretzky holds every major scoring record in NHL history. He won four Stanley Cups in Edmonton between 1984 and 1988 and is still the measuring stick against which every player who came after him gets compared. When Peter Pocklington traded him to the Los Angeles Kings in August 1988, Gretzky cried at the press conference. So did the city. That trade is easily the defining event of Oilers history. Everything the franchise has done since has been changed by what was lost that summer.
Gretzky never came back to Edmonton the way Odysseus comes back to Ithaca. But the whole story still revolves around him. Fans think about that trade every time someone asks how this franchise became as great as it is. No other comparison was going to work here.
Mark Messier as Penelope
Penelope in both Homer and in Nolan’s film can be called the most strategically sharp person in the story. Anne Hathaway plays her as someone who has spent years managing a palace full of men who want what belongs to her husband. She has no backup and no guarantee that he’s even still alive, and she handles it through her wit and stubbornness. She is the reason there’s anything left to come home to.
When Gretzky was traded in 1988, most people assumed the dynasty was done. Mark Messier became captain that autumn and led Edmonton to another Stanley Cup in 1990 without Gretzky, beating the Boston Bruins in five games. He was physically intimidating in a way Gretzky probably never was, and the people who played alongside him described him as the engine that kept the team running when the star was gone. He later went to New York and, in 1994, publicly guaranteed a Rangers win in Game six of the conference finals when his team was facing elimination, then scored a hat trick to back it up. Messier kept things together through that force of will. The household ran because of him. That’s Penelope.
Connor McDavid as Telemachus
Telemachus grows up as the son of a legend he has never met. He is expected to carry that legacy while the legend itself is absent surrounded by people who would prefer he step aside. Tom Holland plays him as a young man with obvious talent who is still figuring out who he is outside of his father’s name. There is real potential and real effort there, but also a gap between what everyone around him expects and what he has actually had the chance to prove.
Connor McDavid has been the best offensive player in the league for the better part of a decade. He has won the Hart Trophy, the Art Ross Trophy and has taken the Oilers (twice) to the Stanley Cup Final. He is already second on the franchise’s all-time points list behind only Gretzky. By any fair measure he is one of the greatest players to ever play the game.
And yet every conversation about him eventually comes back to the Cup he hasn’t won, the standard set by players who retired before he arrived. There’s this weight of expectation that predates him by forty years. McDavid is still mid-story. The film ends before we see who Telemachus becomes when the pressure finally lifts. In in Oil Country, we want him to have his own legend.
Jari Kurri as Athena
Athena in Nolan’s film barely appears. Zendaya is on screen for a small fraction of the total runtime. But she shows up at the moments that matter and nudges things in the right direction.
Jari Kurri is the most underrated player on what most people consider the greatest roster in NHL history. In 754 games with the Oilers he put up 474 goals and 569 assists for 1,043 points. His best season was 68 goals and 63 assists in 78 games. Almost nobody mentions those numbers in the same conversation as Gretzky’s, even though the two were deeply linked. Kurri’s whole value came from reading where the puck was going before it got there and placing himself at exactly the right spot to finish.
He won five Stanley Cups with Edmonton, became the first Finnish player inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame and then led the team in scoring during the 1990 championship run after Gretzky was gone. Quiet, precise, and essential to outcomes that usually got credited to someone else. I think Kurri is one of the most overlooked players in the history of the sport and it really bugs me every time his name gets left out of the conversation.
Paul Coffey as Calypso
Calypso is one of the odder parts of Nolan’s film. Charlize Theron plays her as someone who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years, offering him immortality and everything he could want. The sequences slow the film down but the character herself is very gripping. The hero has to want to go home more than he wants to stay.
Paul Coffey was so offensively brilliant as a defenceman that he basically redefined what was possible at that position. He holds 33 NHL records across the regular season and playoffs and sits second all-time in scoring among defencemen. Ray Bourque, who holds first place, needed more than 200 extra games to build that lead. Coffey won three Cups with the Oilers before a contract dispute led to a trade to Pittsburgh in 1987, where he won another.
He came back to the Edmonton bench last year as an assistant coach under Kris Knoblauch. His style was always slightly ahead of what the conventional wisdom said a defenceman should look like, which made him easy to misunderstand and impossible to replace once he was gone.
Grant Fuhr as Circe
The Circe sequence is one of the quirkiest of Nolan’s film. Samantha Morton plays her with an unsettling calm as she feeds Odysseus’s men a stew that turns them into animals. Nobody around her understands what she is until it’s too late and Morton never tips it. The results are strange and unforgettable.
Grant Fuhr was the most unconventional great goaltender of his era. He backstopped five Stanley Cup teams during the decade when the NHL was scoring at higher rates than at any point in its history, and he did it in ways that coaches who didn’t know him couldn’t always follow. He won the Vezina Trophy in 1988 and was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players in 2017. His technique was entirely his own. People would wince watching goals go in and then look up to find the Oilers winning anyway. I find him fascinating for exactly that reason. The numbers tell part of it. The eye test tells the rest.
The suitors (like Antinous) as… the lost years
Antinous in Nolan’s film has convinced himself that wanting what Odysseus built is the same as deserving it. He works charm and menace in equal measure to hold his position in a palace he has no real claim to. Robert Pattinson plays him with this cold confidence that comes from never having been truly tested.
We’re not naming names. But every franchise that built something great has eventually attracted people who showed up after the fact and assumed the culture would transfer to them automatically. The Oilers had a stretch between the early 1990s and the McDavid era where that was very much on display. Anyone who watched those teams knows which years we mean and which names come to mind.
Leon Draisaitl as Menelaus
Menelaus is the king of Sparta. He fought the same war as Odysseus and carries it in his body the same way but came out of it different. He is a serious credible figure with his own authority. Jon Bernthal plays him with some real physical presence and gives him one of the most affecting scenes in the film. Menelaus earned what he has.
Leon Draisaitl has won the Hart Trophy as league MVP. He has been runner-up for it more than once. He and McDavid tied for the NHL scoring lead in the 2024 playoffs with 33 points each. Draisaitl is German, which still makes him a somewhat unusual figure at the elite level of a league long dominated by Canadian and American players and he has quietly put up numbers that would lead almost any other team in the league.
The McDavid and Draisaitl partnership is one of the best in modern hockey. Both players make each other better. The narrative that always puts one of them at the front slightly undersells what the other one is. Draisaitl, to me, is one of the most complete players in the game right now, and I think he’d be the undisputed best player on about 28 other rosters. Like Menelaus.
Kevin Lowe as Eumaeus
Eumaeus is Odysseus’s swineherd. He is the first person Odysseus reveals himself to on his return. John Leguizamo makes him feel like the emotional centre of the film. He has been paying attention the whole time and understands Odysseus better than almost anyone.
Kevin Lowe played 1,037 games for the Edmonton Oilers and was the defensive heart of five championship teams. He was surrounded for most of his career by the most gifted offensive players in the history of the sport, and his job was to make sure none of them had to worry about the other end of the ice. He became general manager, then president and been part of the organisation in some form for nearly five decades. The Hall of Fame inducted him in 2020. The five banners hanging in Rogers Place don’t go up without him.
The city of Edmonton as the homecoming
The most powerful part of Nolan’s film is the ending when Odysseus arrives back at Ithaca in disguise and has to test whether what he left behind survived.
The Oilers haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1990. McDavid has taken the team to back-to-back Finals and come back without it. Draisaitl has been right there with him. The city has been waiting for a homecoming that keeps getting delayed. Some of the near-misses have been very painful to watch.
The journey home in Homer is long and goes wrong in almost every possible way before it works out. What makes it matter is everything that got spent along the way. The Oilers of the 1980s gave Edmonton the kind of run that most cities never get even once. So, we’re still in the middle of the story waiting for the homecoming.
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