Christopher Nolan took John Leguizamo to lunch at the Odeon in New York and told him something that made him forget to eat. “You’re going to play the most loyal character in Western literature,” Nolan said, per The New Yorker. Leguizamo, who grew up in Bogotá and Queens and has been working in Hollywood for 40 years, sat across from one of the most powerful directors alive and thought: that’s a big deal.

And, boy, it was.

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, Leguizamo plays Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd who keeps Odysseus’ household alive through years of his master’s absence, and counsels Telemachus on how to become the man his father was. And, when Odysseus finally returns home in disguise, he breaks open in a scene that The Guardian called “an emotional, sympathetic portrayal” and that rogerebert.com said might earn him “a ceremonial ‘you’ve been great for decades in everything’ supporting award.” Leguizamo is aged up with white hair and hand-painted cataract contacts, covered in the filth and wind of a 900-foot Sicilian cliffside set. And he is, by every account from every publication and every person that has seen the film, the heartbeat of it.

What is wild about all of this is that anyone is surprised.

The Typecast They Could Not Keep John Leguizamo In

“It’s as if, because I’m a Latin man, I always have to play the villain or the aggressor or a perp,” Leguizamo told The Hollywood Reporter. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, raised in Queens, trained at NYU Tisch, and he has spent four decades fighting that sentence with his filmography. The Eumaeus role, tender and blind and loyal to his marrow, the emotional conscience of a three-hour epic, felt closer to who he actually is than most of what Hollywood handed him. “I feel like Eumaeus is more me than a lot of things I’ve been in,” he told the Reporter. “It’s such a huge part of Latin culture to be loyal to family, loyal to a friend. It’s loyalty above everything else.”

That loyalty to craft, character, to the work itself, is what you find when you go back through his career. And you should go back.

Benny Blanco Started It All

His breakout arrived in 1993, when Brian De Palma cast him opposite Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way. Leguizamo plays Benny Blanco from the Bronx, a young gangster running on wounded ego and dangerous ambition. He is also a man Carlito underestimates until it costs him everything. The role required him to make a character genuinely threatening and pitiable at the same time. And he did it so completely that most people remember hating his guts during the film, which is precisely what a performance like that is supposed to do to you.

The Movie We Still Don’t Talk About Enough

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar came out in 1995, one year after The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And, per Leguizamo, that timing cost it everything. “There was only room back then for one drag queen movie. We didn’t get the accolades that we deserved, I feel,” he told Bustle. He plays Chi Chi Rodriguez, a drag princess on a cross-country road trip with Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze. The performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The film made nearly $50 million at the box office and has spent the decades since building the cult audience it should have had from the start.

It is undoubtedly one of John Leguizamo’s finest performances. And the reason has everything to do with what he said about it himself. “LGBTQ+ teenagers came up to me a lot and said that that movie gave them the courage to come out to their family,” he said. “That’s what you hope your work does: gives people a sense that they’re seen, that they’re important, that their lives matter.”

John Leguizamo’s Stage Was Never Just a Stage

Between his film roles, Leguizamo built a parallel stage career that earned him more credit than Hollywood often gave him on screen. His one-person shows, Mambo Mouth, Spic-O-Rama, Freak, and Latin History for Morons, are each a different kind of argument for what he can do when given full control of the material. Freak, his semi-autobiographical HBO special, required him to play himself, his grandfather, his uncles, and several other characters with enough distinction that none of it collapsed. What’s more, he held it all together through sheer force of presence. He won Emmys and Tonys for this work.

The New Yorker observed that through those shows, he placed himself in the oral tradition of storytelling, the same form The Odyssey itself comes from.

Sid the Sloth Built Him a Home

While the critics were deciding what to do with him, Leguizamo was building an empire one animated sequel at a time. Starting with the original Ice Age in 2002, his voice work as Sid the Sloth helped build a franchise that has generated an estimated $6 billion across films, television, merchandise, and gaming. He told Entertainment Tonight that the returns were transformative: “It paid my bills. It got me a second and a triple home. It paid for my kids’ college.”

The role also gave him room to do something his film career rarely allowed: be genuinely funny. Sid is ridiculous, warm, and beloved. And Leguizamo played him for over two decades because the character, in his own words, “allowed me to be really as funny as I want to be. In movies, I’m usually more dramatic, but in that one I got to be hilarious. I got to be so silly and create this incredible character and creature.”

From Encanto to The Menu to Eumaeus

The past five years have been a sustained demonstration of what John Leguizamo does in ensemble work when directors trust him with something. As Bruno in Encanto, the misunderstood Madrigal uncle they don’t talk about, he brought the kind of nervous, warm, genuinely funny humanity behind “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the song that hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. In When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s shattering miniseries about the Central Park Five, he plays Raymond Santana Sr. with a quiet, devastating complexity that earned him an Emmy nomination and that asks the audience to sit with a father’s failure and love at the same time. In The Menu, he plays a faded movie star invited to a dinner where he learns the chef despises him for his last film. And he wrings more dark comedy out of that premise than any other actor in the cast could have.

For John Leguizamo, He Has Officially “Landed”

After his first private screening of The Odyssey at the Lincoln Square 13, Leguizamo and his wife sat in Row G in a nearly empty theater and both wept. He described the experience of making the film, of working on a 900-foot cliff above the Mediterranean, of going blind in hand-painted cataract contacts, of having Christopher Nolan take off his own coat to warm him between takes on a freezing hillside in Sicily, as an arrival of sorts. “I’ve landed,” he said. “All my gifts and everything, all my talent and all my hard work, have brought me to this place.”

Tags: John Leguizamo