Released in 2001, O is a film directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, and Elden Henson, the play had a budget of $5 million and raked in nearly $20 million at the box office. The rights to the film were eventually sold to Lions Gate Films.
O is a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello. It is set in an American high school and revolves around the principal character Odin James (Mekhi Phifer), a basketball player whose reputation is secretly destroyed by another player, Hugo Goulding (Josh Hartnett). Despite its contemporary setting and character name changes, the plot of the film adheres relatively closely to Shakespeare's original play. In Othello, (full title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice), a military commander for the Venetian army during the Ottoman-Venetian War marries a young Venetian woman, Desdemona. A lower-ranking soldier, Iago, plagued by jealousy for Othello's success, plots to manipulate and ruin Othello's marriage and career. O translates this story to modern-day high school, using basketball in place of the military setting.
Because Othello is the "Moor of Venice," he was traditionally represented on the early modern stage as dark-skinned, the term "moor" being a Medieval Christian European name for Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta. The word evolved to become a more derogatory term for all Muslims, Arabs, and other dark-skinned non-Europeans during the early modern period. As such, contemporary performances of the play traditionally cast a Black actor in the lead role, as is also the case for O. Therefore, race becomes a prominent theme throughout the film, though it is never addressed explicitly as a source of conflict among characters.
