John Leguizamo has revealed the surprisingly intense way he got into character for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and it involved stumbling around his own house in the dark. The actor plays Eumaeus, the loyal servant to Matt Damon’s Odysseus, in Nolan’s adaptation of the Greek epic. Because the character is older and partially sighted, Leguizamo said he threw himself into method acting to understand what daily life would have been like. Via Universal Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he explained that his vision on set was genuinely affected by the prosthetics he had to wear. “I’m blind in the movie … They were specially fabricated lenses that were hand-painted and they did cataracts in both my eyes. One is really cataract and the other one’s partially cataract.” Once Nolan told him about the character, Leguizamo said he immediately started researching both ageing and sight loss. “When he [Nolan] told me I was going to be older and I was going to have aging make-up, being the method actor that I am, I started studying older people and how they moved. When he told me I was going to be sight-impaired, I was like: ‘OK. Oh, wow.’ I have a high school friend who’s legally blind, so I studied her a lot. “We hung out. Then I started doing my method: Going around the house with all the lights off, trying to get from one place to the other at night, trying to walk around and see what is it that you do to protect yourself and how do you memorize furniture and spaces, as my friend told me about.” Via Universal He also wasn’t willing to take any shortcuts when it came to looking older. Rather than wearing a wig, Leguizamo said he and Nolan agreed to bleach his real hair instead, a process that took around 10 hours over two days. “Chris and I both don’t believe in wigs. I have a very hard time with wigs on actors. It always looks like it’s floating for some reason. So we bleached the hell out of my scalp for five hours one day, five hours the next. “The make-up took six hours the first day because it was really beautifully laid on by Luisa Abel, who’s incredible. And I have bags: They squeeze my throat and put glue and squeeze my face and put glue, which stretches all my skin. Then age spots. Just the craziness of it all. And I couldn’t see! I couldn’t really see.” The physical transformation was only part of it. Leguizamo also said his method acting routine on set caught Nolan’s attention, with the director apparently fascinated by how he prepared before filming. For all the latest film and TV updates and hot takes, like our Facebook page. Featured image credit: Universal Post navigation Next storyPrevious story
