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The actor wore contact lenses while portraying Eumaeus, which impaired his eyesight.
Key Points
- John Leguizamo’s contact lenses for Eumaeus made it difficult for him to see anything — let alone doing anything.
- “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 admitted.
- The Odyssey is now in theaters.
Bathroom trips while filming The Odyssey were an odyssey in itself for John Leguizamo.
The comedian, who appears as Eumaeus in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, revealed that he wasn’t able to see for hours at a time due to the contact lenses he wore to play the visually impared character.
“Not being able to see for 12 to 14 hours a day. Like, I couldn’t see my phone, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t call,” he told Entertainment Tonight.
Leguizamo said both of his eyes weren’t “clear” while he portrayed the farmhand who was fiercely loyal to Matt Damon’s Odysseus, watching over his home and family — Telemachus (Tom Holland) and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) — while he was gone.
“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 recalled.
Perhaps the worst part for Leguizamo was being alone while still wearing the blinding contacts. “And then when I was alone, I just had to be inside my head because that’s all I had," he shared. "Too much time with my own thoughts. It’s a dangerous thing!”
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Leguizamo spoke about working with director Nolan, telling PEOPLE in 2025 about his intuition behind the camera. “It was like being with a visionary — like what I imagine it must have been like to work with Stanley Kubrick,” he said. “Somebody creating worlds, and who thinks in a different way than the rest of us.”
In July, the Ice Age actor also mentioned how comfortable Nolan made the cast feel while working on The Odyssey by standing behind the camera while filming. “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 told PEOPLE.
“It’s just an incredible place for a director to be instead of in the video village hundreds of feet away,” he added.
Along with Leguizamo, Hathaway, Damon, and Holland, The Odyssey’s star-studded cast includes Elliot Page, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, and Jon Bernthal.
The Odyssey is now in theaters.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
