“A very sick man”: Matt Damon shocked Robert Pattinson on the set of The Odyssey

To play an aging Ulysses, the star of the film did not hesitate to hurt himself.

After ten years of Trojan War, then another ten years of traveling home, it is an elderly Odysseus who finds Ithaca at the end of The Odyssey. He returns home pretending to be an aging beggar. An incognito return which allows him to examine the situation, and in particular the pack of suitors trying to convince Penelope to mourn the loss of her husband.

To mark the wear and tear that has affected the Greek hero, Matt Damon is not content to appear gray and tired. He literally broke his voice screaming in his trailer. Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland were surprised to say the least by this method, as they confided during the promotion of the film.

Holland, who plays his son Telematics on screen, found this preparation “amazing“. Pattinson, who plays Antinoos, Penelope’s most enterprising suitor, recounts the anecdote in more detail and with humor to MTV UK (via Variety):

“Matt was in the trailer next to mine and he was making these noises. He’s such a nice guy… I thought he was on the phone and that he was seriously ill. He screamed and screamed and screamed. I figured he was having a really bad bathroom experience. In fact, he was losing his voice to sound older. No, really, you lose years of life doing that.”

To put himself in the shoes of Ulysses, Matt Damon also underwent a physical transformation. As he revealed in the “New Heights” podcast, the actor notably melted at the request of Christopher Nolan:

“I lost a lot of weight. He wanted me to be lean but muscular. At the same time, after consulting my doctor, I stopped eating gluten. I used to fluctuate between 83 and 90 kilos, and I did the whole movie at 75 kilos. I hadn’t been this light since high school. So it was a lot of training and a very strict diet..”

The Odyssey is currently in theaters.