John Leguizamo, Shut Up

Whatever else you can say about Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, there is no doubt that his casting choices are strange, and the chosen cast is filled with privileged people who do little but whine about how oppressed they are. 

That’s not shocking, I suppose, since we are talking about people in the entertainment industry. They make their living pretending and playing to the crowd, and victimhood is worth quite a bit of clout in such circles. 

The cast has not a single Greek member, which is bad enough. It is based on a feminist rewriting of the myth, which makes it worse. About the only thing it has going for it is that it is directed by one of Hollywood’s most bankable figures right now: Christopher Nolan, who knows how to grab your imagination. 

Still, a lot of people are disgusted by all the race-swapping and the inclusion of “Eliot” Page as a male warrior. 

Speaking of Helen, here she complains (wrongly) about how Homer’s Odyssey wasn’t female-centric enough, despite the fact that much of the story is driven by strong female characters, including Athena. 

Lupita Nyong’o, who plays ‘Helen of Troy’ in ‘The Odyssey,’ accuses Ancient Greek poet Homer of misogyny.

“I’d be like ‘So Homer how you feel about the screen time given to these women considering how little you spent with them?’” pic.twitter.com/grSbwQgqHT

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) July 6, 2026

But it’s not Nyong’o’s idiocy about which I want to write, as dumb as it is. After all, she admitted she had never read The Odyssey before the script was handed to her, which is likely true for most of the cast. 

No. It’s another actor from the movie that set me off today: John Leguizamo. He isn’t a big-name actor, like Tom Cruise, but I promise you have seen him in countless movies and TV shows.

Between previous and current projects, he has 171 acting credits. If you are a man, you would recognize him immediately as the car chopper in John Wick. 

Leguizamo recently found out that he has a drop or two of indigenous blood coursing through his veins. Not much, since his ethnic background is Spanish and Basque. His ancestors came over as Conquistadors, serving the Spanish Crown, and they became immensely wealthy. 

John Leguizamo didn’t know his family tree’s complexities until he appeared on “Finding Your Roots.”

The Colombian-American actor, 62, made several surprising discoveries while filming an episode that aired during Season Eight of the PBS show. For starters, he learned that two of his ancestors once worked for royalty.

His seventh great-grandfather, Sancho Londoño Zapata, worked as a local administrator for the Spanish crown and was the richest person in his area at the time of his death.

“Where’s my money?” Leguizamo joked after hearing the news. “That’s incredible.”

Leguizamo was shocked to see how far back his lineage goes. “I can’t believe I got a ninth great-grandfather. What, are you gonna go to the beginning of time?”

But it goes back even further. The show traces the star’s 15th great-grandfather on his mother’s side, arriving to Sebastián de Belalcázar, a Spanish conquistador. As Gates put it, “His boss was the king of Spain.” De Belalcázar, who died in 1551 in Colombia, lived an “exceedingly well documented life for a man in his era,” per Gates.

“(My family is) gonna freak out and bug out,” Leguizamo said.

The actor wasn’t prepared to hear that his relative played a key role in the conquest of several Spanish cities while serving as a conquistador. Sebastián de Belalcázar served under Francisco Pizarro, the “infamous conquistador who brutally subjugated the Incan empire.”

Earlier in the episode, Leguizamo discovered that he has indigenous relatives in his lineage. “I’m getting teary-eyed,” he said, while seeing an ancestor listed as a “noble Indian.” He said, “It’s incredibly to know that’s where I get my indigenous blood from. The direct name, the direct person.”

Guess which ancestors he identifies with? Hint: he’s a Hollywood actor. 

He’s clearly of mostly European/Spanish descent. It was HIS ancestors who did this.

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) July 7, 2026

Ironically enough, my wife has a similar background, with a hint of indigenous blood and more than enough relatives going back to the days of the Conquest, although her Spanish ancestors settled in the New Mexico region of the Southwest, where they enslaved natives for other purposes. 

Leguizamo’s history is quite wrong as well. While it is true that the Spanish filled up their coffers with plenty of gold and silver from the Americas, it was nowhere near the quantity that he seems to believe. Gold? It was around 180-200 Metric tons, not 500,000, and that gold and silver helped it dominate European trade for a while and funded a significant fleet, the Spanish wasted it for the most part, while economically productive countries outstripped it. 

England had almost no wealth, but kicked Spain’s butt in the 16th century. 

Leguizamo conveniently forgets that the Spanish were able to conquer the Azteks with a few hundred soldiers and just a few horses because the Azteks were so brutal that their fellow indigenous tribes turned on them. He defeated an empire with 5-600 men. It’s pretty hard to believe that the only reason why Latin America is relatively poor compared Europe and the United States is that their gold was stolen. 

💯

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 7, 2026

Speaking of which, while Leguizamo complains that the Latinos are being held down by horrible Europeans (from whom he is almost exclusively descended), he conveniently ignores why they are called “Latinos” and speak either Spanish or Portuguese. 

It’s because Latinos are mostly descended from people whose languages derive from Latin. 

Of course, we can argue about the brutal tactics that the Conquistadors and the Spanish rulers of Latin America used when they controlled the region, but they are arguably less brutal than those of their Indigenous predecessors, who literally ripped the hearts out of slaves in human sacrifices. 

Human sacrifice was common in MezoAmerica in pre-Colombian times. I’m pretty sure that those sacrifices wouldn’t had led the region to economic and political dominance in the world, just as the mere presence of gold and silver didn’t ensure that Spain would become economically dominant in Europe during the industrial age. 

Even though it got temporary wealth, its economic and political system remained hostile to the conditions that led to capitalism and industrial development. It is still relatively poor, with a GDP per capita barely half that of the United States. 

None of this matters to Conquistador-descendant Leguizamo. He needs his street cred as a descendant of the oppressed. 

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