Even in the sprawling, star-studded ensemble Christopher Nolan assembled for “The Odyssey,” John Leguizamo stands out. As Eumaeus, the blind servant who awaits the return of Odysseus (Matt Damon) while watching over his master’s wife (Anne Hathaway), son (Tom Holland) and aging dog, Leguizamo delivers a performance that is by turns shrewd and heartbreaking.
The 66-year-old actor’s career is full of major movies, including “Moulin Rouge!” and the animated hits “Ice Age” and “Encanto.” Still, “The Odyssey” stood apart from the start. “This is so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done,” said Leguizamo, whose transformation for the role included special contact lenses that rendered him nearly sightless.
“The Odyssey” appears poised for a strong awards run that could include Leguizamo, but for now, he is basking in the film’s huge worldwide box office, which he attributed in part to its diverse casting. “The movie being so beautifully inclusive means that now, this story belongs to all of us,” he said on a video call last week.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
It’s astounding that you can make us feel for Eumaeus after he’s introduced throwing a puppy off a cliff.
Can you believe? I thought, I’m going to be the most reviled person in cinema history! That’s what they did with runts back then, only the strong survived. But the puppy was safe, there was somebody with a soft blanket catching it right off camera.
It helps, of course, that your character bonds so well with the surviving dog.
Argos! It’s an ancient breed called a Portuguese Podengo. I call it a Portuguese pendejo. That’s Spanish for …
… I know what that’s Spanish for.
It’s not the brightest breed in the world. There are only 75 of those dogs left — they’re an ancient, ancient breed. But he was not aggressive at all, and he’s sweet. I’m Method, so I spent a lot of time with the dog, hugging him, kissing him, trying to make him my best friend.
Do you know why that breed was picked?
Because it’s the most ancient breed that’s closest to what the Greeks would have had. Nolan is a stickler for detail, and I give him such respect. He stands behind the camera, you know he’s there with you. It makes me feel heard and seen and protected because in this movie, I went to places that I don’t usually go to, like close to an emotional break.
Does that take a toll on you?
I am Method and I believe you have to really go through something, you can’t pretend. And I did study at Lee Strasberg. I killed Lee Strasberg!
He died after you took his class?
I was in his class and I did a sense memory that was so bad he didn’t survive it. He passed away that night, rest in peace. So yeah, I believe you have to go through it, but I felt I was in capable hands with Chris, so I was able to go to really scary places within myself and dredge up a lot of pain. In the end, it’s healing because you let it out. It’s better to let it out than bottle it up.
You’re almost unrecognizable in this film.
I kept telling Chris, “Look, I’m never going to work again. Everybody’s training 24/7, looking studly, and I look like a testicle.” But when I was younger, I lived for transformations. I thought that’s what real acting was, to go as far away from yourself as possible.
How did you feel before your first day?
It was a combination of feelings. I felt incredibly ready and I was nervous as [expletive].
Do you often get nervous before a shoot?
Never, I’m not a nervous type of guy. But Chris Nolan, you blow people up in your head. I’d never worked with him before, so I didn’t know what was going to happen. I had to play old, blind, all these emotional beats, and it was also 900 feet above sea level. They had to helicopter me up there. I’m on top of this cliff where you can fall to your death. Every plant was poisonous on this cliff. They told us, “If you break the sap and put it to your eyes, it will blind you.”
What was it like to perform those high-pressure scenes in IMAX?
I never worked with an IMAX camera. It’s 300, 400 pounds, sounds like a lawn mower. On the first day, I started doing my scene and he goes, “You don’t have to yell.” I go, “But I can’t hear myself.” And they didn’t tell me it was three minutes per roll.
Meaning, they had to reload rolls of film during a long take?
I had a 10-minute speech and it was like, “Cut!” I was like, “Oh my God, did I do something wrong? Am I messing it up?” And they told me, “No, we’ve got to reload.” Then it’s like five minutes to reload because it’s really thick and difficult, and there’s only one person in the world can do it. Then I have to revamp myself up. And then again, I got two minutes in, and it’s already “Cut!”
IMAX camera aside, I would imagine that the practical locations and lack of green screen were helpful.
The fact that everything was so practical makes it easier for the actors to act, and then the results are so much more real and organic. It’s palpable that what you’re seeing on camera is really happening. I mean, that incredible scene with the ghosts of the dead soldiers, stuntmen were buried underneath the sand with snorkels. Like a hundred people were buried, then they come up. Oh my God, it’s so riveting to watch!
I fear we’ve reached a tipping point where people don’t believe what they’re looking at anymore. So a film like “The Odyssey” resonates for feeling more real and tactile.
Hollywood is starting to embrace A.I. and thinking that’s going to solve things — is it? “The Odyssey” shows you that that’s not what people really want.
I’m sure you saw Elon Musk say that he’s going to generate his own A.I. version of “The Odyssey.”
Yeah, it’s going to be beautiful. It’ll be phenomenal. Good luck with that fake, soulless, empty [version]. I just don’t understand people who go out of their way to hatemonger. José Martí, the great Cuban poet and revolutionary, said there are two kinds of men: those that create and those that destroy.
This diverse cast, to me, is symbolic of the real world that we’re living in. We Latin people are 20 percent of the population, and we’re still virtually invisible, especially in executive and corporate rooms.
You’ve been very vocal over the last several years about the lack of Latin opportunities in Hollywood.
I was a very idealistic young man, I believed in meritocracy, no matter that I came from an underprivileged background. But when I was in N.Y.U., I was the only Latin person in my classes, which was shocking to me in a city where we’re equal to whites in population. D.B. Sweeney and Andrew McCarthy were in my class going to five auditions a day, and I’m going to one every five months for a drug dealer or murderer.
I started to realize that no matter what I did, no matter how talented I was, I was never going to have the same opportunities as them. It’s systemic racism I was dealing with for four decades, but it affects you because you start internalizing that you’re not good enough, otherwise you would be further along. Now that I’m 66, I know it’s not me — it’s the system.
In a 2022 essay for The Los Angeles Times, you called out Hollywood for casting Spaniards like Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas in Latino roles.
I feel a little bad because I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus — artists are my colleagues. I just get upset because colorism is still alive in Hollywood with Latin people. Spaniards are not Latino, they’re just not. We need to have the whole diaspora of Latinos represented, not just white Latinos or white-passing Latinos, because that’s basically almost like casting white people.
When it comes to representation, are there young artists who’ve told you that your presence helped them?
Lin-Manuel [Miranda] told me that. Kris Diaz, who just wrote [the book for] “Hell’s Kitchen” for Alicia Keys, [the actor] Jorge Lendeborg. But even Matt Damon came to me and said when him and Ben Affleck saw my one-man shows, they realized, Oh my God, if this kid can do it, we can write our own story, and they wrote “Good Will Hunting.” That’s incredible to me because when I told my stories, I just wanted to inspire kids who felt like me, who looked like me.
