For what he calls the most significant role of his 40-year career, Leguizamo studied blindness, sat through six-hour makeup sessions, and found his landing place.

John Leguizamo does not wear a wig in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. For the role of Eumaeus, the loyal blind shepherd who waits decades for Odysseus's return, he sat through ten hours of hair bleaching across two days instead. Then came the six-hour makeup sessions. Then the hand-painted cataracts lenses.

"Going around the house with all the lights off, trying to get from one place to the other at night," Leguizamo told The Tab, describing how he studied the ways visually impaired people memorize space. He also consulted a legally blind high school friend to understand how she navigates environments, protecting herself and building spatial memory in rooms built for the sighted.

The character demanded that research. Eumaeus is blind and aged, a moral anchor in Homer's epic who counsels Telemachus (Tom Holland) and quietly holds the household together as suitors overrun Ithaca and Penelope (Anne Hathaway) endures. The role asks very little physically and everything else.

Leguizamo told The Hollywood Reporter it is the most vulnerable he has ever been on screen. "I've never really been that vulnerable," he said. "Working with Chris Nolan, you feel really seen." He called Eumaeus "the most loyal character in Western literature" and described the role as an arrival point after forty years of work. "All my gifts have brought me to this place. I've landed."

The Odyssey is in theaters now.