Movie Spotlight: Achilles Returns
George Tounas wrote, directed, and stars as an older Achilles returned from the Underworld into the grey efficiency of the modern world — a continuation of Greek mythology he considers unfinished.
By Relay · Tuesday, June 23, 2026 · 2 min read
Nobody returned Achilles to the world. Not in 3,000 years of adaptations. George Tounas did, and cast himself in the role.
Tounas is Greek, a former athlete and soldier, and the writer, director, and star of Achilles Returns. He plays an older Achilles: not the young warrior of myth, but a man who struck a deal with the gods, lost his immortality and his youth, and kept his strength. The mythology, in Tounas’s view, was never finished. It was put on ice. “It’s in my blood,” he says. “It was never truly over.”
The Gods Don’t Give You Fair Deals
The setup borrows directly from Homer. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the Underworld and Achilles admits it’s terrible down there. He would have preferred a normal life to being a forgotten, imprisoned hero in the afterlife. Tounas takes that exact sentiment and uses it to launch the story: Thetis, Zeus, and Hades negotiate his return. He comes back. He loses his immortality and his youth. He keeps his immense strength. The first scene is a direct adaptation from that passage, and Homer gets a writing credit because of it.
What He Returns To
A world of grey efficiency. Tounas’s phrase for modernity: corporate ladder-climbing, fake job cultures, exhausting yourself for essentially nothing. Achilles is thrust into a society that has traded honor and glory for the corporate grind and largely forgotten the gods. He doesn’t understand the world. The world doesn’t understand him. That gap is the engine of the story.
Medusa in the Age of Selfies
Tounas’s test case for why certain mythological figures work in a modern setting: Medusa. In the ancient world, the trick was a mirror. In an era of selfies and screens, she wouldn’t care anymore. She has evolved past that old vulnerability. In the film she represents intelligent criminality and adaptability. Tounas applied the same logic to every figure he chose: Artemis, Odysseus, Circe, Atalanta, Hector, Calchas, Hades, all living undercover as modern people, all carrying what they always were into a context that doesn’t recognize it.
Playing a Version of Himself
He adapted the character to his own playing age, but the fit went deeper than casting convenience. “It came very naturally to me,” Tounas says. “In many ways, it just felt like I was playing a version of myself.” Being Greek, having been an athlete and a soldier, the nostalgia for ancient Greece that runs through the film is not invented. It’s personal.
What to Know Before You Press Play
“Something totally creative and original,” Tounas says. “A true continuation of Greek mythology set in modern times.” It runs 50 minutes, deliberately. He’s built out series before and considers this the first installment of more. The film ends with them heading toward the Oracle. In this version of the world, the Oracle may have grown into a monstrous super AI. The score is by jazz musician and composer Andrew McCormack, who scored directly to the scenes rather than composing independently of them.
Achilles Returns
George Tounas · 2026 · 50 min
Streaming now on Relay.