Stephen Fry’s reference pool runs deep. While discussing the enduring appeal of Greek mythology on Zoom from his office in London, the British entertainer constructs a continuum from Friedrich Nietzsche to E.M. Forster without blinking an eye. Then he hopes aloud that he hasn’t “gotten all Jordan Peterson” while musing that the recent rise in Greek and Roman study might have something to do with the freedom it offers from contemporary identity politics.
These omnivorous pulls do a good job of explaining Fry’s enduring appeal as a public figure. Across his five-decade career, the 67-year-old has been a sketch comedian, a novelist, a TV presenter, an actor in biopics and crime farces and murder mysteries, and—perhaps most notably for American audiences—the narrator of the Harry Potter audiobooks. All the while, he’s remained the rare kind of entertainer whom audiences seldom turn on: a friendly, familiar face whose quick wit and erudite charm unite generations.
In May, Fry will return to publishing with Odyssey, his fourth book focused on Greek mythology. He previously profiled the Greek gods in 2017’s Mythos, examined their human counterparts in 2018’s Heroes, and retold the story of the Trojan War beyond the limited scope of The Iliad in 2020’s Troy. Mirroring those volumes in shape and subject, Odyssey sees Fry retelling Homer’s familiar epic in a digestible format that’s neither dumbed down nor artificially high-minded. He peppers a comprehensive overview of Odysseus’s 10-year journey from Troy to Ithaca with playful footnotes, cheekily modern dialogue (“This is all about that damned Odysseus again,” Zeus moans at one point, sounding like a frustrated Brit), and full-color photographs that trace visual art’s relationship with The Odyssey across several centuries.
The idea for the project first came to Fry at a dinner party. “I can’t remember how the conversation came around to it, but I started telling the story of the castration of Uranus by Cronus, and everyone just sort of stared at me,” he recalls, grinning, a smart black sweater vest pulled over his paisley button-down. “They said, ‘How do you know all this?’ And I said, ‘Well, I loved the Greek myths as a boy, didn’t you?’ And they did, but not that much. Most people have heard of Apollo, but they may not know how he was born, or who his twin was, all these kinds of details. So, I thought, well, I’ll have a go.”
Fry’s statement that he loved Greek myths as a boy is, in fact, a classic display of British false modesty. Born in London in 1957, he was a middle child and not a natural student. Still, after his godmother gave him a book of myths when he was seven or eight, he began to study Ancient Greek at his primary school in Norfolk, enthralled by the “game” aspect of conjugating Greek verbs and comparing them to their Latin counterparts. He was much better with languages, he found, than physical activities. Part of his vision for Mythos, Heroes, Troy, and Odyssey has been to extend a hand to similar children while “taking the smell of the schoolroom” out of
the exchange, as he puts it.
“In Britain, there’s still a cloud of chalk dust involved with Greek study. Even just the names—you write down ‘Clytemnestra’ and you realize it sounds very like a sexually transmitted disease,” Fry quips. “I try to make it so that I’m telling the story in such a way that it doesn’t matter if someone hasn’t remembered absolutely everything, they just trust that what comes next will be interesting.”
Another draw, Fry admits, was the fact that immersing himself in mythology allowed him to zoom out from the most hot-button issues of the moment and focus on more elemental concerns. Unlike realist fiction, which Fry has dabbled in with the semi-autobiographical novel The Liar and the psychological thriller Revenge, writing about Greek myth offered him a chance to cleanse himself of contemporary discourses, which he compares to “having a pear sorbet after a heavy meal.”
“I’m not making an old man’s moan about the fact that you ‘can’t say anything these days,’ ” he clarifies, adopting a mocking tone of faux outrage. “I’ve never had a problem with not being able to say things. But with myth, you get to write about honor, betrayal, revenge, love, power, all without the pertinences and accoutrements of our culture. If you set stories in the world of now, suddenly it’s about our classes, our power structures, which are all very temporary. But if you set it in myth, you can really go to town and let rip on the most powerful and eternal questions about how humans live and what they feel.”
For a different writer with a more straightforward career, a sudden pivot to Greek mythology might have felt out of place. For Fry, it registered as little more than the act of a proud cultural polyglot having a gas. Indeed, taking a look at even the last 10 years on Fry’s résumé could induce vertigo in the most open-minded observer: Mythos was his first writing project after the widely panned memoir More Fool Me, which he followed with a stiff-lipped performance in Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen adaptation, Love & Friendship. He first planned Mythos as a stage production but decided that simple prose on the page, plus the opportunity to add footnotes, was more powerful than stage trickery could ever be.
Fry’s eternal-student mindset bolsters his Odyssey—he paints a far more robust portrait of Telemachus than most Greek hobbyists will be used to—and makes him an extremely stimulating interview subject. When comparing the virtues of Emily Wilson’s and Robert Fagles’s Odyssey translations, he manages to steer the conversation to critic and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn, who’s working on a version of his own and struggling with one of the very first words. Later, Fry maps the concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian voices onto Star Trek characters, deeming Spock the wise Apollo, Bones the impulsive Dionysus, and Captain Kirk, like the ideal Greek, the proverbial Goldilocks who splits the difference. (Fry, like the rest of us, is eager to see what Christopher Nolan does with his feature-film adaptation of The Odyssey. All he knows for sure is that Athenians are “slightly annoyed” that Nolan won’t be shooting in Greece.)
The sheer, dizzying volume of quotes and allusions that Fry throws out over the course of a short conversation could conspire to obscure the man at the center of the circus. Instead, they land more like a blinding spotlight. He doesn’t dwell for long on his childhood, his comedy career with eventual House star Hugh Laurie, or his breakthrough film performance as Oscar Wilde in 1997’s Wilde. Instead, with a full library spreading out behind him, Fry very much resembles the boy he must have been 60 years ago: curious enough about the world around him to revive a dead language in the hopes that he might understand it better.
