The actor stars in the new Christopher Nolan movie as Eumaeus, Odysseus’ most loyal servant
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NEED TO KNOW
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John Leguizamo plays Eumaeus, a loyal servant, in Christopher Nolan’s star-studded adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey
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Leguizamo described watching the film with his wife in a nearly empty IMAX theater as an emotional experience
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The Odyssey is in theaters now
John Leguizamo plays a key emotional role in The Odyssey, the final product of which left him and his wife weeping.
The Ice Age actor, 65, stars in Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan‘s adaptation of Homer’s epic as Eumaeus, the loyal and blind servant of the movie’s lead, Odysseus (Matt Damon). While Odysseus journeys to find his way home to Ithaca after nearly 20 years, Eumaeus’ loyalty to his king never shakes, despite the abuse he faces from Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) brute suitors.
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Leguizamo has described working with Nolan, 55, on the set of The Odyssey as the “zenith” of his career. The culmination of the experience came when the actor watched the movie for the first time alongside his wife, Justine Maurer, at Nolan’s “favorite theater,” AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York City’s Upper West Side — which features one of the few “true” IMAX 70mm screens in the country.
“I knew it was Row G that’s supposed to be optimal, so we sat in Row G,” Leguizamo told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published July 19 of the experience. “It was just us and maybe four other people in the entire theater. It was a very, very empty experience at the beginning.”
He continued, “Then all of a sudden it starts and you’re like, ‘Whoa, it’s so massive. The score is so unbelievably beautiful.’ My wife doesn’t cry at movies and she gripped my hand and she was weeping and then I was weeping.”
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Leguizamo joked that he “wasn’t sure” if he was crying because of his wife or because of Odysseus’ final monologue in which he expresses remorse over the brutality of war. “That hit me so hard. It’s the beauty of what Chris did,” Leguizamo said.
The actor previously opened up about working with Nolan while speaking with PEOPLE at the N.Y.C. premiere of the movie, recalling one scene at the end of the movie in which his character is ill and experiencing a “fever dream.”
“I was having a fever dream as my character, Eumaeus, and losing it because I’m kind of method, and [Nolan] saw that I was freezing because we’re dressed in mini skirts and it was freezing in February,” Leguizamo recalled of their period costuming. “He took off his coat and put it on me.”
“And Matt Damon goes, ‘I’ve been working for six months in the oceans, in Iceland, and you put the coat on him?!,‘ he added with a smile. “Yeah, Matt’s the funniest.”
The actor added that the highlight of working with Nolan was how involved the director was, notably physically standing just behind the camera while directing.
“I think it’s the most personal and safe place to have a director because you’re eye to eye and then you feel safe, you feel seen, you feel more capable of being vulnerable,” Leguizamo said. “It’s just an incredible place for a director to be instead of in the video village hundreds of feet away.”
In addition to Leguizamo, Damon and Hathaway, The Odyssey features a cast jam-packed with A-listers including Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Elliot Page, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, Mia Goth, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Benny Safdie and Himesh Patel.
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The Odyssey is in theaters now.