Let Hollywood’s Favorite Little Weirdo Read You The Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan’s Movie Arrives – SlashFilm

Dan Stevens is without doubt one of the most fun actors round. Having gotten his begin on British TV with a 2004 “Frankenstein” miniseries headlined by eventual Guillermo del Toro film star Luke Goss, he exploded in reputation after enjoying Matthew Crawley on the historic TV drama “Downton Abbey.” However lest you suppose that he was solely able to standing out in interval items (he was additionally in a 2006 “Dracula” adaptation and a 2008 miniseries model of “Sense and Sensibility”), Stevens quickly proved that he was a zany character actor trapped in a studly physique.

In 2012, Stevens performed the son of the legendary Dr. Van Helsing in Amy Heckerling’s horror/comedy “Vamps,” solely to painting, basically, a darkish mirror model of Captain America in Adam Wingard’s marvelous B-film “The Visitor” two years later. Stevens has since rotated between large tentpoles and really unusual style tasks the place he tends to play oddballs. Certainly, he was the Beast in Disney’s abysmal dwell-motion “Magnificence and the Beast,” but, across the similar time, headlined the deeply bizarre Noah Hawley “X-Males” TV sequence “Legion.” He was even in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” but he portrayed a peculiar robotic in “I am Your Man” and was superior within the gnarly sci-fi physique horror flick “Cuckoo.”

Heck, Stevens has executed this so usually that /Movie as soon as ranked the freaky lil’ weirdo characters he is performed to this point.

What many might not know is that Stevens, together with his deep, clear voice, additionally narrates audiobooks on the aspect. One can try Audible and see a number of dozen titles that he has learn aloud, together with the Robert Fitzgerald translation of “The Odyssey,” which you can take heed to on YouTube. If you wish to brush up on Homer’s epic earlier than the discharge of Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation, it is a nice time.

In fact, Dan Stevens has been narrating audiobooks for nearly so long as he is been showing on stage and display. His earliest audiobook got here out in 2007, when he narrated Dugald A. Steer’s “The Dragonology Chronicles, Vol. 1: The Dragon’s Eye.” His voice was properly-fitted to mysteries and the like, and he is narrated many thrillers. By the 2010s, he had grow to be well-known sufficient to be trusted with properly-recognized classics, and he lent his voice to Roald Dahl’s autobiography “Boy: Tales of Childhood,” Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel “On line casino Royale,” Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” 

In 2014, he did the majority of his audiobook work, recording classics like Agatha Christie’s “Homicide on the Orient Specific,” Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Younger Poet,” and, in fact, Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” 

Stevens even as soon as learn a portion of the King James Bible for the BBC and has starred in lots of different audio dramas apart from. The man is a virtuosic actor, even should you can solely take heed to his voice. 

As somebody who has listened to many, many audiobooks, I provide this editorial: I really feel that skilled display actors are likely to make higher audiobook narrators. Actors “play” the literary roles a bit of bit and usually learn in a quicker, extra conversational vogue. Skilled narrators, in distinction, “get out of the way in which” of the textual content, studying it slowly and clearly with out a lot inflection. That permits the textual content to face by itself, in fact, but it surely’s not very thrilling to take heed to.

In different phrases? You probably have time to take heed to “The Odyssey” narrated by Stevens, I advocate that you just do earlier than Christopher Nolan’s film model hits theaters on July 17, 2026.