Let Hollywood's Favorite Little Weirdo Read You The Odyssey Before Christopher Nolan's Movie Arrives

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Dan Stevens is one of the most exciting actors around. Having gotten his start on British TV with a 2004 "Frankenstein" miniseries headlined by eventual Guillermo del Toro movie star Luke Goss, he exploded in popularity after playing Matthew Crawley on the historical TV drama "Downton Abbey." But lest you think that he was only capable of standing out in period pieces (he was also in a 2006 "Dracula" adaptation and a 2008 miniseries version of "Sense and Sensibility"), Stevens soon proved that he was a zany character actor trapped in a studly body.

In 2012, Stevens played the son of the legendary Dr. Van Helsing in Amy Heckerling's horror/comedy "Vamps," only to portray, essentially, a dark mirror version of Captain America in Adam Wingard's marvelous B-movie "The Guest" two years later. Stevens has since rotated between giant tentpoles and very strange genre projects where he tends to play oddballs. Indeed, he was the Beast in Disney's abysmal live-action "Beauty and the Beast," yet, around the same time, headlined the deeply weird Noah Hawley "X-Men" TV series "Legion." He was even in "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire," yet he portrayed a peculiar robot in "I'm Your Man" and was awesome in the gnarly sci-fi body horror flick "Cuckoo."

Heck, Stevens has done this so often that /Film once ranked the freaky lil' weirdo characters he's played so far.

What many may not know is that Stevens, with his deep, clear voice, also narrates audiobooks on the side. One can check out Audible and see several dozen titles that he has read aloud, including the Robert Fitzgerald translation of "The Odyssey," which you can listen to on YouTube. If you want to brush up on Homer's epic before the release of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation, this is a great time.

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In truth, Dan Stevens has been narrating audiobooks for almost as long as he's been appearing on stage and screen. His earliest audiobook came out in 2007, when he narrated Dugald A. Steer's "The Dragonology Chronicles, Vol. 1: The Dragon's Eye." His voice was well-suited for mysteries and the like, and he's narrated many thrillers. By the 2010s, he had become famous enough to be trusted with well-known classics, and he lent his voice to Roald Dahl's autobiography "Boy: Tales of Childhood," Ian Fleming's James Bond novel "Casino Royale," Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights," and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." 

In 2014, he did the bulk of his audiobook work, recording classics like Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," and, of course, Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." 

Stevens even once read a portion of the King James Bible for the BBC and has starred in many other audio dramas besides. The man is a virtuosic actor, even if you can only listen to his voice. 

As someone who has listened to many, many audiobooks, I offer this editorial: I feel that professional screen actors tend to make better audiobook narrators. Actors "play" the literary roles a little bit and typically read in a faster, more conversational fashion. Professional narrators, in contrast, "get out of the way" of the text, reading it slowly and clearly without much inflection. That allows the text to stand on its own, of course, but it's not very exciting to listen to.

In other words? If you have time to listen to "The Odyssey" narrated by Stevens, I recommend that you do before Christopher Nolan's movie version hits theaters on July 17, 2026.