Christopher Nolan's phone-free routine is still going strong; here's how he reaches his cast

Christopher Nolan has built a career and a reputation on doing things his own way. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Oppenheimer, Inception, and now The Odyssey is famous for jaw-dropping visuals and mind-bending timelines. He's also famous, at least among his collaborators, for something much simpler: he doesn't own a cell phone.

The curious way Christopher Nolan contacts his actors

That quirk has resurfaced in the press thanks to Matt Damon, who stars as Odysseus in Nolan's new epic and recently pulled back the curtain on what it's actually like to get a call from one of Hollywood's most in-demand directors.

According to Damon, the process starts not with Nolan himself, but with his wife and longtime producing partner, Emma Thomas. She's the one who sends the heads-up text, letting an actor know a call is coming their way. Damon recalled getting a simple message from Thomas asking if he was free to talk — with the reasoning being, in his words, that Nolan simply doesn't carry a phone.

From there, the call itself arrives without warning, from a number nobody recognises. That's because Nolan isn't dialing from a personal line at all — he's essentially borrowing a phone at Universal Studios. Even Nolan, Damon noted, has no idea which number will show up on the other end before he picks up.

For actors who've worked with Nolan before, an unfamiliar call from a Universal exchange has apparently become something of a tell. Everyone in his orbit seems to know exactly who's on the other end before they even answer.

This isn't a case of a filmmaker who simply hasn't gotten around to buying a smartphone. Nolan has spoken about the choice directly. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he confirmed he avoids texting and email altogether, and even writes his scripts on a computer with no internet connection. He's framed it less as technophobia and more as a matter of focus.

The habit doesn't stop once cameras start rolling, either. Actress Anne Hathaway, who worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, has previously described his sets as similarly phone-averse, with devices kept out of sight during filming.

The Odyssey marks Damon's third film with Nolan, following Interstellar and Oppenheimer, and by his account, the call-from-a-mystery-number routine hasn't changed a bit. What started as an ordinary-seeming catch-up conversation, he said, eventually turned into Nolan revealing he was developing a new project — the one that would become The Odyssey, now in theatres and boasting a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron, among others.

For an industry obsessed with being constantly reachable, Nolan's insistence on staying just slightly out of reach has become part of his mystique — proof, perhaps, that even in Hollywood, some habits are worth holding onto.

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