John Leguizamo says that, after more than 40 years in his career, he had never faced a challenge like the one he experienced during the filming of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s ambitious adaptation based on Homer’s work.
In the film, the actor plays Eumaeus, Odysseus’ elderly and loyal servant, who is also blind. To make the character realistic, Leguizamo used special contact lenses that practically prevented him from seeing throughout the entire filming day.
“I couldn’t see for 12 to 14 hours a day. I couldn’t read my phone, I couldn’t walk by myself, they even had to take me to the bathroom and help me eat”, the actor said in a recent interview.
The experience was so intense that it ended up affecting him emotionally. He explained that spending so many hours isolated from everything forced him to live only with his thoughts, something he described as a mental challenge as intense as the physical one. Even so, he says it was all worth it.
“I’ve been in this industry for 40 years. This was the most exciting thing I’ve done in my life”, he said, calling the project the high point of his career.
In addition to the challenge of playing a character with a visual impairment, Leguizamo also spent hours each day made up as a much older man and endured long filming days in extreme conditions. He even revealed that, during a scene filmed in freezing weather, Christopher Nolan gave him his own coat after noticing that he was on the verge of collapse.
The actor is part of the star-studded cast of The Odyssey, where he shares the screen with Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, among others, in one of the most ambitious productions of the British director’s career.