The Houston rapper stepped onto a table in an Italian castle to open “The Odyssey.” Now he’s signing first-look papers at a Hollywood studio and finishing a sixth album he carries around on an iPod.
Travis Scott has played to crowds of tens of thousands. He has the highest-grossing solo rap tour in history behind him. And yet the moment he remembers most from Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is the one where he was, by his own admission, nervous as hell.
The setup was not gentle. Scott’s first shot of the day was a close-up, delivered from the top of a wooden table inside an ancient castle on a remote Italian island, with hundreds of extras below him and Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson watching from the room. He raised his stave and launched into the song of Odysseus: “A war. A man. A trick,” the bard’s opening account of the fall of Troy.
“All those actors were there, and I’m standing on the table,” Scott says. There was no party energy to hide behind, he adds. Camera in his face, Nolan a few feet away, everyone else locked into character.
Nolan admits the scheduling was deliberate. He put the close-up at the top of the day, threw Scott into the deep end and asked him to hold the attention of the room. He says so now with a laugh.
Why Nolan wanted a rapper, not a musician
The two have worked together before. Scott, then 29, contributed the end-credits track to “Tenet” in 2020, and he co-wrote “When I’m Home,” the end-credits song for “The Odyssey.” But the acting job was a separate conversation, and Nolan says he was explicit about that: he was not hiring Scott as a musician.
Adapting a nearly 2,700-year-old poem for Imax meant finding a way into the oral tradition without turning it into a museum piece. Nolan’s solution was to treat rappers as the descendants of the poets who once performed these stories aloud. He wanted someone on screen who could recite and command a room in a way a modern audience recognizes, rather than a formal, rarefied idea of a bard in the palace of Ithaca, which he says he would have found alienating.
Scott came in already knowing the text. He read “The Odyssey” as a kid in the Houston suburbs, back when he was Jacques Bermon Webster II, because his paternal grandmother Bernice Webster, an English professor, put it on his summer reading list. He also faked the essay. “I did some CliffsNotes bullshit,” he says. “I got a whoopin’ because I lied about reading it.”
His grandmother has since collected her winnings. Scott says she’s told him this is exactly why she made him read the book. Last week he posted a text from his mother, Wanda Webster, arranging to bring Grandma Bernice and his maternal grandmother, Sealie Wood, to a screening. Scott is thinking bigger: he might rent out an entire theater and fill it with family. His kids Stormi, 8, and Aire, 4, with ex Kylie Jenner, will sit this one out, given the R rating.
A moving target
Interviewing Scott is less a sit-down than a series of adjustments. On a Sunday afternoon in midtown Manhattan, after a photo shoot on a broiling NoMad rooftop in a Hermès suit, he keeps shifting on a low couch that his legs don’t fit, picking at the zipper of an accent pillow. He’s due uptown to catch Jay-Z at Yankee Stadium. He smokes a blunt throughout, setting it down only when a subject requires both hands.
By the time we reach his dressing room, the Rick Owens shades are off, the suit has been swapped for baggy sweatpants and a faded Oasis T-shirt layered under gold and diamond chains, and he’s deep into “The Warriors,” the 1979 gang movie he keeps returning to. He describes its characters as war heroes for peace.
That film, as it happens, is also how he and Paramount found each other.
The Paramount deal
Scott’s first-look deal at Paramount Pictures is being finalized as we speak, a new chapter for Cactus Jack. Paramount Pictures co-chair Josh Greenstein bonded with Scott and Cactus Jack manager and GM David Stromberg over “The Warriors” when they met to talk about expanding the brand’s footprint at the studio.
“Creativity emanates from every pore of his body,” Greenstein says, citing everything from Scott’s clothes to his cars to his taste in film. He also makes the commercial case plainly: Scott’s taste moves culture, and Greenstein counts that as a superpower.
Cactus Jack started in 2017 as a label and publishing company with artists including Sheck Wes and Don Toliver. It has since sprawled into consumer products, with collaborations spanning Nike and Jordan, “Fortnite,” Saint Laurent, Dior, Audemars Piguet, Hot Wheels, Reese’s Puffs and McDonald’s. It has already worked with Paramount on merchandise, and the limited-run “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Scream” apparel drops sold out almost immediately.
The new agreement widens that from T-shirts to film, television, theater and experiential projects. Scott frames his interest simply: he wants to make good films, and he says Paramount isn’t afraid of good ideas.
Part of the logic is financial. His music video budgets had crept into indie-film territory, and he started asking why that money couldn’t produce something with a longer life than three or four minutes.
The studio, meanwhile, wants younger audiences back in theaters, and few artists command a fandom like Scott’s. The “Circus Maximus Tour” ran two and a half years, sold 2.2 million tickets and grossed $265 million. Paramount previewed the relationship at CinemaCon this year in a Tom Cruise-narrated reel: as Cruise pledges fresh perspectives, the camera rolls to reveal Scott, iced out, security posted in front of four chocolate-brown luxury cars in Cactus Jack’s signature shade, before he climbs onto a matching golf cart with an assistant hauling pink Goyard luggage across the lot.
What he’d actually make
There’s no slate yet, but he has a genre in mind. Horror, he argues, has mutated into something more interesting than horror. He’s drawn to slow dark thrillers where almost nothing happens until the end, carried by suspense, writing and a cast you don’t recognize. The Japanese film “Exit 8” is the reference point. The last thing he saw in a cinema was “Michael.”
Would he greenlight a movie about himself? Yes, though his answer is a joke and a real answer at once: “I would do ‘Entourage’ again.”
He knows Lin-Manuel Miranda is taking “The Warriors” to Broadway next spring, which hasn’t put him off doing his own version. He just hasn’t decided whether it’s a show or a film.
He is unambiguous about theaters. Streaming is fine, he says, but going out to see something with other people is the point, and he grows genuinely irritated at the idea of sound designers pouring months into a mix that ends up playing through a living-room TV speaker. He apologizes, a little sheepishly, for the rant, then relights his blunt.
Learning the job at 5 a.m.
Scott used the “Odyssey” shoot as an apprenticeship. He arrived at 5 a.m. and stayed until 3 p.m. whether or not he was needed, mostly to watch Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema work. Nobody on that set retreated to a trailer, he says, which was new to him and suited him fine. He trailed the two of them asking questions and leaning into the monitor as they framed shots on Imax cameras.
The lesson he took away: see the vision through, never come up short on it. He notes that his mentor Ye told him something similar years earlier.
“The Odyssey” isn’t his first acting credit. He appeared in the 2021 indie drama “Gully” and in Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” plus a cameo on HBO’s “Ballers.” He also turns up as himself in the Owen Wilson comedy “Rolling Loud,” shot at the 2024 festival, in which Wilson plays a father who sneaks his underage son into the event and ends up onstage during “Fe!n.”
He says he’d like to act more and respects people who do it as a craft. But acting means serving someone else’s vision, and Scott’s instincts run the other way. Producing, directing, composing and sound design are where he thinks he’s most useful.
Nolan sees the same thing, pointing to “Circus Maximus,” the film companion to 2023’s “Utopia,” which included segments from Nicolas Winding Refn, Korine, Gaspar Noé, Valdimar Jóhannsson, Kahlil Joseph and Scott himself. Nolan credits him with an instinctive grasp of how to pull an audience in through both ears and eyes.
Scott’s own explanation for his track record is less technical. He builds the experiences he wanted as a fan and never got.
Not everything has landed. For 2015’s “Rodeo,” his first full-length, he wanted to ship an action figure with the physical record. The idea collapsed, though he eventually got his toys anyway through McDonald’s and “Fortnite.” Far more serious was the night in 2021 when 10 people died in a crowd crush during his Astroworld Festival set in Houston, a tragedy he has described as personally devastating and which his commercial partnerships survived.
This fall, USC launches a course examining Cactus Jack as a case study in scaling personal creativity into a platform. All 140 seats went in roughly 20 minutes. “I think he understands that what drives contemporary culture is experience and immersion,” says Dr. Josh Kun of USC’s Communication and American Studies department, describing a model in which lifestyle becomes an entire way of moving through the world.
Album six, and the trophy shelf
The follow-up to “Utopia,” his double-platinum first No. 1, is in progress. He carries the tracks on an iPod, which fans clocked on his waistband at a recent World Cup match in Houston, where he sat with Stormi and Aire.
He won’t describe the sound, but he’ll name what’s in his ears: Parliament, Oasis, Van Halen for the mega-choruses and heavy bass lines, Don Toliver, Raphael Saadiq and Daft Punk. Touring changed his approach. He’s now writing for the person at the very back of the bowl and trying to push the live show toward something closer to theater. “Utopia” was originally conceived as a play, he notes, and he’d like to bring real-world experiences back before everything gets digitized.
With “The Odyssey” positioned as a major Oscar contender, the credits song could put him in the best original song race. Scott has been nominated for 10 Grammys and won none. “I still need a Grammy, but I would love to take home an Oscar,” he says.
Asked whether the Grammy drought drives him, he takes a long pull and thinks about it. It isn’t why he does the work, he says, but he sets goals and likes to hit them. He’s noticed that the people holding the trophies are always the ones insisting it doesn’t matter. To him, it does.
How the song got made
In March, Scott joined Nolan and composer Ludwig Göransson at the DGA theater in West Hollywood for a screening. Göransson had been sketching an end-credits idea with English singer-songwriter James Blake and wanted Scott involved. (One of Nolan’s favorite “Utopia” tracks is “Til Further Notice,” which features Blake.)
First Scott had to watch the film. “Travis was sitting right next to me, and during the Cyclops scene, he put his hoodie up over his head,” Göransson says, laughing. He describes Scott as a chameleon who slips out of every genre and manages to sound like the past and the future simultaneously.
A studio session was already booked for immediately after the screening. Göransson played what he had, with the bard’s lines from the nearly three-hour film sitting in the mix as placeholders, and Scott started freestyling in the gaps. He describes putting his artist hat back on to convey the whole ordeal: the trials, the attempt to get home, Penelope waiting, the years lost with Calypso. The video was shot in a castle in Switzerland.
Mid-story, Scott gets up to grab a red Airhead from the catering table. When he sits back down, he learns a piece of trivia about the song: it’s Nolan’s first songwriting credit.
“Welcome to my world, OG,” he says.