Will Yun Lee is calling Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey “one of the hardest” shoots of his career. Speaking on the red carpet, the actor said the production pushed the cast physically and mentally, while also giving him a front-row seat to what he described as a master at work.
“I would say this is the one,” Lee said when asked about the biggest odyssey in his Hollywood career. “We started in Morocco, and we were the men with Matt in every country. I think everything Matt said was probably being nice. It was one of the hardest things we ever had to do.”
Lee said the challenge was constant throughout the shoot. “Every day was an hour hike up in armor,” he recalled, adding that the production took the cast from Morocco to Iceland under difficult conditions.
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One of his most memorable stories involved a very small piece of craft services. “We were out in the middle of the black sands in Iceland. The sun hadn’t gone down and it was like 4:00 in the morning, and somebody goes, I think Matt goes, ‘Who has the nuts?’ That was our craft services. We were looking for one bag of nuts and one of the PAs had the nuts. So everyone was just fighting for these nuts, and that’s how we survived the whole shoot.”
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Despite the grueling nature of the production, Lee said the experience was creatively rewarding. “I got to sit in front of the master. I got a front-row seat and watched him paint his painting. It was rough, but it was one of the most beautiful things to see and be a part of,” he said.
Asked what he would take away from the experience, Lee kept it simple. “Everything else will be easy,” he said. “Every night I went, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is one of the most difficult days,’ and then he managed to top the next one. So I’m just grateful to be a part of it, and I’m grateful that I survived it.”
Lee also spoke about the film’s action and practical sequences, saying the toughest scene involved the sheep. “It was the most dangerous and the hardest one for some reason. It was the sheep. They were mad.”
He also emphasized that the production relied heavily on practical effects rather than digital ones. “It was all practical,” he said. “You would send reports home in the middle of the night to your wife or my family, and they were like, ‘There’s no way there were real pigs sitting eating with you.’ And yeah, everything was practical.”
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One of the most memorable parts of filming, Lee said, came during his prosthetic transformation. “I sat in the chair and got transformed. It took about an hour and a half, and they had the best of the best doing it. You can’t stop staring at yourself in the mirror when you’ve finished going through prosthetics,” he said.
Lee added that the process felt surreal but efficient. “I thought it was going to be a 10-hour process, and she had it down to a science. That was a day I’ll never forget. That was probably my most memorable day on that set.”
When asked what Nolan should adapt next, Lee joked that horror would be the natural choice. “Horror movie for sure. When we left the pig sequence, we definitely thought we were in a horror movie,” he said, before naming Amityville Horror.
Lee’s comments offer a vivid glimpse into the scale and intensity of The Odyssey, a film that appears to have demanded as much from its cast as it promised on screen. For Lee, the reward was not just surviving the shoot, but being part of what he called a rare creative experience.
