Samantha Morton casts a spell and steals 'The Odyssey.' She's always been a little dangerous

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Set us as preferred Samantha Morton didn’t mean to start humming during that scene in “The Odyssey,” the scene everyone is talking about, when, as the sorceress Circe, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, literally molding them into their true savage selves.It wasn’t in the script.

It just happened.And when Morton was done, she looked over to director Christopher Nolan, waiting for him to say something like, “Maybe try it without the humming, Samantha.” But Nolan didn’t say anything, so Morton did it again and the music that was swirling inside her head, which she remembers now as a symphony of glass harmoniums and theremin, kept coming out as Circe went about her witchy business, altering her gluttonous guests, who are busy slurping and gulping down her stew.

“These are sounds that can make you go mad, apparently,” Morton, 49, tells me, reclining on her bed at the Hotel Chelsea in New York.“So to transform the men, the magic came not just from my hands but from my sounds.”Morton unabashedly believes in magic.

How else, she asks, can you explain how a girl who was shuttled between children’s homes and a dozen foster families, only to be living on the streets of Nottingham, England, at the age of 14 with a criminal record, be here talking with me now, sipping green tea at the Chelsea?“That’s got to be guardian angels and love — and not that I suddenly became good at acting and got a job,” says Morton, a veteran who’s been at it for 35 years, dazzling audiences and stealing scenes for the likes of Steven Spielberg, Jim Sheridan and, now, Nolan.“I’ve always believed that anything is possible and there’s no doubt in here,” and she pats her heart, “because I’ve always felt this immense love for me from another entity.” Movies Christopher Nolan explains ‘The Odyssey’: The direct...