John Leguizamo walked around his home with the lights off to prepare to play a partially-sighted character in The Odyssey.
The 65-year-old actor plays Eumaeus - the faithful servant of Matt Damon's character Odysseus - in Sir Christopher Nolan's new epic and he used a number of method acting tricks to help him understand how to tackle the role of a man who is older and has limited sight.
John told The Hollywood Reporter: "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."
The actor went on to reveal he went to great lengths to prepare for the part, adding: "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."
To play an older character, John also had to have grey hair and he refused to wear a wig so he spent hours having his dark hair bleached.
He explained: "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."
John went on to add the director was "intrigued" by the method acting techniques he brought to set, adding: "I think Nolan was watching a method actor like me for the first time and he was intrigued by what I was doing because I had to work myself into a mood.
"I’m talking to myself, jumping up and down, hitting myself, yelling, crying. Then I’m in the scene and I’m going through crazy things and he’s watching it. He was fascinated by what it takes."
