The Interviews: The Odyssey Special (ft. Matt Damon & Tom Holland; Himesh Patel & John Leguizamo)

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to a very special episode of The Interviews and this one has been 10 years in the making folks. Well, maybe a couple of weeks. Well, actually, when you factor in the editing time, it's only really been a couple of hours. But nevertheless, it has been an epic journey because this is our interview special for The Odyssey. That's right, Christopher Nolan's eagerly awaited adaptation of the epic Homer poem, in which Matt Damon's Odysseus embarks on a torturous 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. It's finally here. It's been years in the making. It opens in cinemas today, Friday, July 17th.

0:53Chris Hewitt:You may even be watching it as I record this, you lucky, lucky people, because it is very much worth the wait. I spoke to two pairs of actors for the special, and you're going to hear them in the order in which I did them. First up, we have Himesh Patel and John Liguizamo, who play two men whose loyalty to Odysseus manifests in very different ways throughout the film. Patel, who is returning to the Nolan Fold after appearing in Tenet, plays Eurylochus. Odysseus' right-hand man on the journey home. And Ligozamo, a Nolan newbie, plays Emmaus, a sheepherder who stands fast on Ithaca, awaiting Odysseus' return.

1:34Chris Hewitt:I spoke to them both about the Nolan experience, and while we don't do any major reveals, there is some discussion about certain scenes and specific moments. So maybe do wait to hear this until after you've come back from your own Odyssey Odyssey. Oh, and obviously we start off by talking about the World Cup, which may be coming to an end now, but back then was in full swing and Ligua Zamo had just been seen at a game along with Matt Damon. Had a blast doing this. Do please enjoy. Hi, James. John, welcome to the Emperor Podcast. How are you both? Great, yeah. Awesome to be here, yeah. Good, good, good.

2:09Chris Hewitt:Before we talk about the film, I want to talk about the World Cup, because obviously this movie opens on the weekend of the World Cup final. And John, I know you were at a game recently. France, Sweden, and Colombia, Portugal. Two games. Two games. Holy shit. I'm going to the finals, but a club, a special club. Oh, my God. That's pretty amazing. How was it? Oh, my God. Colombia winning was insane. And Matt came down because, you know, he wanted support. It was incredible. Everybody was flipping out. There was so much yellow at the stadium in Florida because every Colombian in America went there.

2:45It was like 70 ,000 people.

2:47Chris Hewitt:Wow. Do you lose yourself when they score? Do you go nuts? Oh, my God. Screaming, yelling, crying. How can you not, man? It's an emotional sport. It is. Emesh wouldn't know that he's a Spurs fan. He wouldn't know. Trust me, I know emotions. I know emotions. You're a Spurs fan? Mostly I know, oh, why? Pain. We won a trophy. Yeah, that's true. Like just over a year ago. That's very, very true. Indeed. But you didn't get to the World Cup, did you? Because the last time we spoke, you were heading to New York for an event, but you didn't get to go to a game. But I watched the England game the other day during our lunch break in New York when Harry scored that amazing winner.

3:27And I just thought, like, that's why he's one of the greatest of all time.

3:32Chris Hewitt:That's football out of the way. Let's talk about the Odyssey. When did your Odyssey begin and how did it begin? Himesh, obviously you'd worked with Chris Nolan before. So did you get a phone call? I got a call from my agents saying, you know, Chris is offering you a role in his next movie. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, just an offer? Because I auditioned for Tenet, and I didn't think I was like. But, and then I had to wait a few days for him to call me and tell me what it was, because my agents had no idea. No one knew at that point. And he told me what it was that we were doing, the role I was playing.

4:09And he told me that I might want to do a few push-ups. And I tried, but. and yeah and then and away we went about a month or so later oh wow

4:21Chris Hewitt:so now once you're in the Chris Nolan club you audition once and then he just calls he just goes I want that I mean it seems to be the way for me I feel eternally privileged you know to have been a part of a movie like this and not have had to audition is just such a huge privilege and I'd be thankful for it for the rest of my life yeah and John what was your experience was it a clandestine meeting in an underground car park or did you get a call It was kind of like that, actually. Yeah, because you're not going to call. He was stood in the shadows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Waiting for the code word.

4:50Chris Hewitt:Code word is UMass. UMass. You know, they said he was interested in me for a role. And then we met for lunch. He had to meet with me first to see, I guess, if I could eat properly. I'm not sure what it was. But he started to talk to me about the role and what it demanded. You know, there was a lot of exposition. Can you make it conversational? He's the most loyal character in Western literature, yada, yada. I'm getting too excited. And at the end of the two-hour lunch, he offered me the part, and I tried to act cool and whatnot. I'm like, yeah, that's great. But inside, I was like, I ran home, called all my friends, hugged my wife, kissed her, whatever.

5:32Because it's a big deal once you get into the Norman camp.

5:36Chris Hewitt:Yeah. How much did you know about Emmaus, first of all, before? I mean, I read the Odyssey as a kid and I read it in college again, but I didn't remember Eumaeus as the most, I didn't remember Argus. Yeah. You know, those are like harder parts to like absorb. But the way he created this role, this real guy who protects his son, teaches him about his dad, takes care of the dog, the property, and feels like he's a surrogate son to him. When he comes back, he's filled with so much pain and emotion and vulnerability that that's what I had to live up to. And it's Eurylochus, is your character, Himesh.

6:12Chris Hewitt:And what did you know about him? Did you do a lot of research once you were offered the role? I mean, I read the Odyssey having never read it in its full form. And I was just waiting for Eurylochus to be mentioned. And then he's mentioned like once when he does something very stupid. And then that's it. so I was very thankful that he'd beefed the role up in this adaptation but what it adds I think is that it adds a level of depth to him in a sense of people know him as this guy who does a thing that isn't a great idea and doesn't help the cause of trying to get home but the reality that we built into this version is that it's the culmination of this erosion of faith in his king, in his leader and it's actually a really heartbreaking thing that he that he decides that this isn't working yeah and i'm gonna have to take matters into my own hands we are gonna have to take matters into our own hands you know i really love that moment before cersei's um cersei's palace would you call it but um when he's you know he asks is this a mutiny and heurilicus says that's up to you you know that's that's it's really heartbreaking and it's i mean it's an example of his great writing.

7:26Chris Hewitt:It strikes me that both characters in a way are both examining the concept of loyalty because they're both very loyal to Odysseus and until, in your case, you're not. But even then you can see the conflict in that relationship whereas Eumaeus is someone who is absolutely, unflinchingly, unstintingly loyal to this guy. And I know, John, from previous interviews you've done that you felt that that was fairly easy to be loyal to Matt. You know, Matt is like, you expect this movie star, you know, with attitude, you know, privilege, entitlement. But that's not Matt. Matt's a regular guy, hangs out, cracks jokes.

8:09It takes care of you. He's an amazing dude. So it was easy to transfer my feelings of my own kids to Matt and making my surrogate son. And then with Chris being there, you know, Chris stands right there at the camera. so when you're doing these intimate scenes you really feel like you're in great hands and safe hands to be as vulnerable or as emotional as you have to be and I let myself go I let myself be as painfully vulnerable as I could be

8:38Chris Hewitt:How much older than yourself are you playing? I'm playing like hopefully 30 years older maybe not so much I look haggard as fuck Yeah and he's obviously a man who's sight impaired as well. They built these contacts. Louisa Abel, who's a brilliant makeup artist. You know, they're hand-painted by only one person in LA. And, you know, and then I can't see at all. You know, I have to be taken to places to the bathroom. Oh, my God. I mean, I can find myself in the bathroom. I just need to be taken. You don't need an assistant. Yeah. The other stuff feel good. Yeah, I got that. I got that. Himesh, I mean, you guys are put through the ringer in this.

9:19Chris Hewitt:There's a lot of physical stuff, a lot of physical action, a lot of water as well, a lot of being shunted around on the open seas. Fun day at the office. So fun, though. Very fun. Hard, of course, physically the most demanding thing I've ever done. Thank God you did those push-ups. Yeah, yeah. Well, did I? I'll let the audience be the judge of that. But, yeah, it was a thrill, you know. It was tough. Of course, at times it was tough. but that's because Chris wants that sort of visceral quality which we all know from his filmmaking but this takes it to another level when you see us at sea when you see the boat sort of crashing over the waves it is actually doing that and some of the guys are not feeling great in that boat what do you call it?

10:06vomit on one side yeah so there was a point where there was a day in Scotland where the boat was moving quite a lot in the water but it was still deemed safe for us to go out but that's where we got a lot of that sort of the movement on the boat On one side of the boat, you've got a bunch of the guys throwing up who just, they get seasick. They can't help it. On the other side of the boat, a bunch of us were just staring at these dolphins that had come out alongside the boat. So, yeah, we were just talking about this vomit and dolphins. Vomit and dolphins is kind of… That was the theme of the whole movie.

10:33We were saying that'll be our hearts of darkness. It'll be called Vomit and Dolphins. Because it is that beautiful to be in all these locations, but they're tough locations, man. I mean, being on, in fact, 900 feet above sea level, you had to climb up that thing. I mean, I can only do it one day because it's like an hour. And I took the helicopter the following day, but everything was poisonous on top of there. You could fall off this cliff, but it was safe. We had the most amazing stunt crew that in the history of stunting who made sure that we were all safe at all times.

11:04Chris Hewitt:Wow. And Chris obviously leads from the front as well. There have been stories over the years that the chairs are banned on Chris Nolan's sets. So obviously you're sitting on chairs right now. This is luxury for you guys. Yeah, I sat on rocks and stones. Yeah. You're welcome to sit down on whatever's available. They're not going to deny you that. Yeah, but they're not going to carry a chair. No. Do you get fined if you're on a chair or something? No, because whatever you're sitting on is available for you to sit on. So, you know. I imagine when you were filming in the palace. Yeah. Oh, there were seats everywhere.

11:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were benches. stools yeah yeah whatever was period and available that's what you're gonna say

11:44Chris Hewitt:yeah you know sneaky sneaky sit down yeah what's the best piece of direction Chris Nolan gave you both I mean sometimes you just need the simplest form of the note and there was a shot in Greece where it's myself sort of interrogating this one a Greek guys amazing actor you know and we we ran it once and then we were gonna go again and also these IMAX mags there's there's only two and a half minutes in a mag. So Chris had to ask the camera assistant how long is left in the mag. And she was like, look, if they do it like that, we're going to go over. It's going to roll out. But we could go a bit faster.

12:19Or then Hoyter was like, well, I could try this. And some of the other guys were like, well, we could try this. And Chris just went and just pointed to the three of us in the scene and went faster, faster. And we got it. You know, sometimes it is that simple. Yeah. Very George Lucas. I love that. John? For me, it was a scene where Matt has come back, and I'm not sure it's him, but I think it's him. And I'm in the bed, and I'm freezing cold. And I said, I want to try this thing. And I'm not sure. So, you know, this sort of feverish dream, barely audible. And he said, go for it. Just do it. And we'll see.

12:57We can always do another take. And so you felt so safe to try stuff. if it doesn't work then I'll be more audible and more articulate but you know it was good to that I was able to like bring it down to a place that may not even be heard amazing because I guess

13:11Chris Hewitt:whenever when you take a role like this and you don't audition per se I mean you had a lunch with with Chris and Himesh you got the call after having worked with him previously when you get to set on day one is there a sense of fear because you haven't auditioned you haven't necessarily place yourself in the role before you get to set. So what's your preparation like? Do you turn up the set going, can I do this? Well, you've been with Chris a lot. I mean, you spend a lot of time. Chris is very hands-on and he wants reality. He wants things to be truthful. And so he's checking the hair, the special effects, makeup, the contacts, the costumes, everything.

13:48He's there with you.

13:50Chris Hewitt:So you feel protected. So you feel like we're going after the same thing. It's pure reality. So you feel so confident on day one. The only thing that was different for me was I never worked with the IMAX camera. I know you did. Yeah. So that was kind of daunting. Just the size of the noise. The size of it, you know your face is going to be like extra, extremely large. So you are aware then. You feel like this extra little bit of pressure to make sure that everything's extra real. Yeah. One last question for you both. Do you have an odyssey in your life? Do you have something that has consumed you for 10, 15, 20 years that maybe you still haven't achieved?

14:28i mean look i'd love to uh you know i'm working on writing right now but trying to sort of like give yourself that that that confidence to go okay i can do it and just give it a go yeah you know i've been trying to write scripts since i was like a 16 year old like since you know since i've learned what that is and that you can do it but i haven't yet sort of done anything um that sort of ended up being made or that i felt the confidence to do and i've barely written anything really so So the odyssey for me is sort of just building that confidence and sort of permission to oneself to do it. Amazing.

15:03John? Well, I'm an activist in America, so I've been trying to get equal opportunity for Latin people in America, and I've been doing that my whole life. My mom was an activist as well. You know, we're the largest ethnic group in America after white people, and yet we're virtually invisible.

15:22Chris Hewitt:I wish you all the best with that. Thank you. As well. And Himesh, with your writing also. Thank you. Guys, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for your time. Sorry to bring this all down. No. I was like, all of a sudden I killed the energy in the room. And that was Himesh Patel making his second Empire podcast appearance in just a matter of weeks after playing Dr. Watson in Enola Holmes 3, and John Leguizamo, who has taken nearly 10 years to fix John Wick's car. One day. One day. Last, but certainly not least, we have Odysseus himself and his son Telemachus, which I can say now, but I banjaxed royally during this interview, with Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, the grizzled warrior battling a sea of torment and doubt as he tries to make his way home, and Tom Holland, who plays Telemachus, the son eagerly hoping to reconnect with the father he never knew.

16:12Chris Hewitt:This is Damon's third Chris Nolan rodeo, having appeared in both Interstellar and Oppenheimer, and Holland's first and the father-son duo were on cracking form. Enjoy. Matt, Tom, welcome to the Emperor Podcast. How are you both? Yeah, great. Good, good, good. You getting some nice father-son bonding time in? That's it, yeah. There wasn't a lot of time spent together on the set of this movie, for obvious reasons. Yeah, we didn't have a lot of scenes together till the end, but we were around. Tom was nice enough to come to dinner with my daughters, which was quite the event in the Damon household.

16:50but yeah no it's I love the structure of the movie because of and really of the of the poem because of you know how it brings them together Tom what was your recollection of that dinner around Matt's we had a lot of fun we did have a lot of fun we were at a lovely little Italian restaurant in Favignano

17:07Chris Hewitt:oh I thought Matt had cooked no no no I wouldn't subject him to that tin of spaghetti no it was lovely it was really nice it was one of my favourite things about meeting your kids was the way they chat about your friends because they'd be like, do you remember that time when Brad came over and then I'd be sat there like, I wonder if they're talking about Brad Pitt or just some dude named Brad or just some guy named Brad or when Ben came around Ben's do you know but did it help in terms of the bond, which is a strange one because Telemachus can never get that right he obviously has never really met Odysseus he's pining for him but there's still there's still a bond of kind of yeah absolutely we you know we had some time before we started shooting in prep where we were fight rehearsing and doing archery training and that sort of thing and then what is so great about the way Chris works is that he wants everyone to be ready and available so even on days where I wasn't working I would be on location you know there were periods of time where I didn't work for two weeks but I I was still out there on location staying in the same hotels should, you know, Mother Nature decide to rain for three days and they want to pivot to a different scene.

18:18And that meant that, you know, every night everyone's eating in the same hotel. Everyone's waking up. We're all bumping into each other in the gym. So there really was a strong sense of camaraderie and family, even for the people like myself that weren't on set all day, every day.

18:33Chris Hewitt:and uh matt obviously you had a bit of a head start on this movie because chris called you before he gave you the script you had what two weeks or so to immerse yourself yeah something like that in the in the poem yeah yeah i went out all things odyssey and and read it again and it's so interesting the way it it it changes for you depending on the age you are when you read it and and and what you it's just so dense it's so full of uh it's why it's the original story. It's the foundational story. It kind of appears in every other story that we tell. And the adaptation that Chris did, I thought, was really remarkable.

19:12I keep saying he's undervalued as a writer because he's so impressive as a director. But I've now read three of his screenplays with Interstellar Oppenheimer in this one. And the two adaptations, that Oppenheimer book was very dense it won the pulitzer prize it was it was and he really did a remarkable job adapting that and i felt that same way about you know this very big story and uh how he how he sets everything up and ties it together and it's it's just it's just built like a swiss

19:45Chris Hewitt:watch it's just a great piece of writing how does he describe odysseus in that script do you remember how did he describe him yeah oh uh he looks like matt damon no i i don't recall uh i i I don't think there was much description. I mean, Homer describes him, of course, as a complicated man. Yes. Like Matt Damon. Yeah, exactly. Like all of us. Like all of us. How did he describe Telemachus? I got it right this time. I got it right. Well done. Thank you. I got a cookie. I remember in our first conversation, one of the things that he felt was very important was to maintain his youth and vulnerability.

20:23You know, it's very easy to read that character and try to find a way to make him feel overly masculine and aggressive and feel like a man. You know, but I think it's really important that in those early scenes when you meet him, you are really seeing a boy and a boy that is pining for his daddy, as Rob says so well in the film. Yeah. How old is he in the film? How old? He's supposed to be 16. Okay. And so for me, that was one of the things that we spoke about the most was finding ways to make him feel very youthful and vulnerable. So that as the movie goes on, what's so cool is I have these three fight scenes and each fight scene to me feels like a step in the right direction to becoming a man.

21:07And one of the coolest things about Chris is that he's a real collaborator. You know, he knows what he wants and he has a real clear sense. But there was a portion of my story that happened very much in the middle, which we ended up saving for the end. And I think that doing that just really was a nice bookend to my character arc for the rest of the film.