The maritime scenes in Christopher Nolan’s new epic were not filmed on a studio platform surrounded by digital water. Matt Damon and his companions went to sea aboard Draken Harald Hårfagre, the largest Viking ship sailing in modern times
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may be rooted in the mythology of ancient Greece, but one of its most imposing performers comes from considerably farther north.
The ship carrying Matt Damon’s Odysseus across the seas is Draken Harald Hårfagre, a fully operational Norwegian longship launched in 2012. Far from being an elaborate film prop, the 35-metre wooden vessel was built to investigate how the great ocean-going ships described in the Norse sagas might actually have behaved under sail. For Nolan, whose cinema has long favoured physical environments, practical effects and real machinery, Draken offered something that a soundstage could not: the unpredictable movement, weight, noise and danger of a working wooden ship at sea. The result is an unexpected but compelling meeting between two maritime worlds. A ship inspired by Viking-age Norway has become the vessel of one of Greek literature’s greatest navigators.
Real ship, real sea
Sea travel is not simply part of Homer’s Odyssey. It is the condition upon which almost the entire story depends. Odysseus spends ten years attempting to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, repeatedly driven away from his destination by storms, hostile gods, monsters and his own decisions. The sea is road, battlefield, prison and supernatural frontier all at once. Nolan therefore wanted the film’s extensive navigation sequences to possess a physical reality. Actors were not merely placed on a stationary deck while waves and horizons were added later. Many scenes were filmed aboard actual vessels in open water, with wind, weather and the movement of the sea becoming part of the performance.
“We needed something wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology that could be out there in open ocean water, in giant swells,” Nolan explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “And the Draken has crossed the Atlantic.”
That last detail was decisive. Draken Harald Hårfagre did not only look sufficiently powerful for a cinematic epic: it had already demonstrated its ability to operate in demanding ocean conditions, so that the actors did not need to imagine that they were standing on a moving ship because… they really were aboard one, at sea.
What is Draken Harald Hårfagre?
Construction of Draken Harald Hårfagre began in March 2010 in Haugesund, on Norway’s western coast. The ship was launched in June 2012 and subsequently underwent a long period of testing and adjustment in Norwegian waters. The name honours Harald Hårfagre—Harald Fairhair—the semi-legendary king traditionally credited with unifying Norway during the ninth century. Draken is generally described as the largest Viking ship sailing in modern times. It measures approximately 35 metres in length and eight metres across, with a 24-metre mast and a square sail covering around 260 square metres. Its clinker-built hull consists of overlapping oak planks. Oak, tar, hemp, iron and silk were used in its construction, connecting the project with materials and techniques belonging to northern European shipbuilding traditions. The ship is equipped with 25 pairs of oars. With two people assigned to each oar, it can theoretically be rowed by 100 people. During longer sailing expeditions, however, it operates with a much smaller specialist crew. It is important to understand that Draken is not an exact replica of a single vessel discovered by archaeologists. Instead, it is a full-scale interpretation of the exceptionally large ships mentioned in Norse saga literature, developed through archaeological evidence, historical sources, traditional craftsmanship and experimentation at sea. That distinction becomes even more important when considering its role in The Odyssey.
A Viking ship playing an ancient Greek vessel
The world of Homer’s heroes predates the Viking Age by roughly two millennia. Draken Harald Hårfagre cannot therefore be presented as a historically exact reconstruction of a Late Bronze Age Greek ship. The ship’s own organisation openly acknowledges this. It describes Draken’s appearance in the film not as a claim of perfect period accuracy but as an example of “cinematic and material authenticity”. Ancient Greek vessels and Nordic longships nevertheless shared several broad characteristics useful to the production: elongated wooden hulls, oars, a prominent mast, a square sail and open working decks. Draken could consequently be adapted visually while retaining the most important quality Nolan required—it could genuinely sail. For the production, modern equipment and elements associated too obviously with its normal expedition configuration were removed or concealed. Swedish captain Björn Ahlander explained that the crew transformed it into an ancient Greek ship, clearing away tents and other modern features to create an open deck. The vessel was therefore not historically converted into a Bronze Age ship in any scientific sense. It was cinematically dressed as one while retaining the structure, power and seaworthiness of a large Norwegian longship.
A vessel proven across the Atlantic
After its launch, Draken spent its early years exploring Norwegian and northern European waters. In 2014, it completed its first substantial ocean voyage, sailing from Norway to Liverpool and back. Its greatest expedition followed in 2016, when the vessel crossed the North Atlantic from Norway to North America. The journey retraced the general maritime world once travelled by Norse seafarers, passing through northern waters towards Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the United States. The voyage demonstrated that Draken was more than an impressive exercise in traditional construction. It was a functioning ocean-going ship capable of travelling thousands of nautical miles with a crew of 32 sailors. That experience made the vessel exceptionally valuable to Nolan’s production. Film sets can imitate the appearance of historical technology, but Draken supplied something accumulated through years of use: practical knowledge of how such a ship responds to wind, waves, sails, oars and the coordinated work of its crew. Emanuel Persson, the ship’s CEO and expedition director, has described Draken as a “living system”. Every element depends upon the others, while the vessel can only be controlled through collective effort.
Matt Damon’s rowing camp
The actors could not simply stand on deck and leave all the maritime work to specialists. Members of the Draken team helped the production understand the ship, while performers were trained to handle some of its equipment. Matt Damon and other cast members attended what Damon called a “rowing camp”. The work was not decorative: moving a vessel weighing close to 100 tonnes required the actors and crew to pull together. For Damon, this meant that acting as Odysseus occasionally became inseparable from the real labour of keeping his character’s ship moving. The physical effort visible on screen was not entirely performed for the camera. It was serving a genuine purpose aboard the vessel. Members of Draken’s wider crew also participated in filming, bringing established seamanship and an intimate knowledge of the ship’s behaviour. Their presence helped preserve both safety and plausibility during work in open water. Filming aboard the Nordic vessels reportedly continued for months around Greek and Italian islands, while Draken was also used during production connected with locations in Scotland and Iceland. Days depended upon sea conditions rather than the predictability of a studio timetable.
The material sound of an epic journey
The greatest contribution made by Draken may not be a particular historical detail but the accumulation of sensory ones. Its oak hull flexes and moves. Rigging strains in the wind. The sail fills unevenly. Oars enter the water with weight and resistance. Crew members must respond to one another and to a vessel that cannot be controlled by pressing a button.
“There is something on board that cannot easily be faked,” so Draken’s CEO Emmanuel Persson in an interview with Artnet “the weight of the oak, the sound of the rigging, the movement of the sail, the crew working together in real wind and water” […] “When you put a real ship in real conditions, it brings a different kind of truth to the image.”
These qualities fit naturally within Nolan’s filmmaking. From the rotating corridor constructed for Inception to the restored aircraft of Dunkirk and the recreation of the Trinity test in Oppenheimer, his productions frequently place performers inside physical events rather than asking them to react to elements that will be created afterwards. In The Odyssey, the sea itself becomes one of those physical events.
A Nordic technology inside a Mediterranean myth
There is a certain poetic appropriateness in casting a Norwegian longship as Odysseus’s vessel. Greek and Norse traditions developed in different periods and cultural environments, but both imagined the sea as a place where navigation, courage and storytelling met. The Mediterranean voyages of Odysseus and the North Atlantic expeditions of Norse sailors belong to different histories, yet both express the human attempt to cross an uncertain world in a fragile wooden craft. The choice should not be mistaken for archaeological precision. It is instead a form of practical storytelling: using a genuine, traditionally built and ocean-tested vessel to recover something of the physical experience that underlies Homer’s poem. Draken Harald Hårfagre was created to take historical ideas out of books and museums and test them at full scale. Nolan’s The Odyssey applies a remarkably similar principle to cinema. The ship on screen may be carrying a Greek king home to Ithaca. Beneath its cinematic transformation, however, it remains unmistakably Nordic: built in Haugesund, inspired by the Norse sagas and shaped by thousands of miles sailed through real northern seas.
Christopher Nolan filmed the maritime scenes of The Odyssey aboard Draken Harald Hårfagre, the largest Viking ship sailing in modern times.
Suggested Online Sources
Drakenhh.com/theodyssey
Drakenhh.com/about-the-ship
Smithsonianmag.com
Artnet.com/art-world/
