John Leguizamo has opened up about the challenges he faced playing Eumaeus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Out in theaters now, the Oscar-winning director’s latest epic features an all-star cast of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron.
While the film is an adaptation of Homer’s famous poem about Odysseus’s perilous journey home after the 10-year Trojan War, Nolan took major creative liberties, including making Eumaeus blind.
In the original text, Odysseus’s faithful swineherd and friend, has no visual impairment. However, for the movie, Leguizamo wore special opaque contact lenses to portray Eumaeus as having been blinded by advanced cataracts.
Recalling the difficult task of playing a blind man, the Carlitos Way star said he “could not see” for up to 14 hours a day while on set.
“I couldn’t see my phone, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t call,” Leguizamo, 66, told Entertainment Tonight. “My other eye wasn’t clear either. I could not see. I had to be taken to the bathroom; I had to be brought back. I had to be taken to eat.”
He added, “When I was alone, I just had to be inside my head because that’s all I had. Too much time with my own thoughts. It’s a dangerous thing.”
The Odyssey, which was released in theaters last Friday, has already become a critical success.
The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey boldly declared it Nolan’s “best film to date,” in a five-star review.
“There are touches of Oppenheimer, Memento and even his Batman movies in this enormous condensing of the British filmmaker’s fixations, brought to life by a cast of seemingly thousands,” she wrote, “but it’s the women (among them Anne Hathaway and Samantha Morton) who steal the show.”
Production on the movie was massive, lasting 91 days, spanning six countries, and requiring 2,000 background actors to film the siege of Troy.
Yet, despite the massive production, Leguizamo praised Nolan’s ability to bring an “indie” feel to the shoot.
“Dude, you know the thing is, okay he’s got a crazy budget, it’s not small, but he runs [it] like an indie film because he’s not doing it by committee, he’s not doing it by what the studio says,” the Encanto actor said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in March.
“He’s like an indie filmmaker but with crazy money.”
The Odyssey is out in theaters now.
