‘I didn’t understand how to be a great teammate until I started acting’: Sean Avery on ‘The Odyssey’ and Nolan’s aura
It’s been less than a week since Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was released in theaters, but the immediate response has been nothing short of spectacular, with the film grossing more than $260 million worldwide in its opening weekend, receiving widespread acclaim from fans and critics alike.
And yet: with an A-list cast that includes the likes of Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya and Charlize Theron, it’s a former NHLer’s role in the film that’s captured the attention of the hockey world.
Sean Avery, who across 10 NHL seasons had 90 goals and 247 points with 1,533 penalty minutes with the Detroit Red Wings, Los Angeles Kings, Dallas Stars and New York Rangers, played Laodamas, a member of Odysseus’ crew which attempted a decades-long return home to Ithaca.
Daily Faceoff spoke with Avery in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles, just days after he attended the world premiere of The Odyssey in New York City.
Christopher Nolan and the 2001-02 Red Wings
Avery said he didn’t read any Greek mythology growing up, but he “watched a lot of He-Man, the cartoon.” He soon picked up a copy of Homer’s Odyssey when he realized he could be in Nolan’s movie.
“I read it, and it’s a dense read. There’s so many characters, multiple storylines,” he said. “I didn’t read Iliad (Homer’s other ancient Greek epic), but hopefully I have to, because maybe (Nolan) is going to go back in time and make Iliad.”
Avery credits John Papsidera, Nolan’s casting director for The Odyssey, Tenet, Interstellar, Memento and The Dark Knight, for helping him get his foot in the door in Hollywood. It was Tenet where Avery got his first shot on a mega blockbuster, working alongside Nolan and actors John David Washington and Robert Pattinson.
As Avery details what it was like working with high-level professionals on the set of Tenant, he compares it to his rookie season with the Red Wings in 2001-02, where he played alongside future Hockey Hall of Famers Nicklas Lidstrom, Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan, Sergei Federov, Brett Hull, Pavel Datsyuk, Chris Chelios and head coach Scotty Bowman.
“It’s almost an aura more than anything,” he said. “It’s obvious when you see it in the minutia. They don’t cut corners, they just go harder than everybody. They’re always the most prepared. The similarities are staggering between the top-level people in industries.”
Avery, who also worked with Nolan in the 2023 summer blockbuster Oppenheimer, said it was on the Academy Award-winning director’s film sets where it really clicked for him how much goes into a production.
“I think what I now realize is that I didn’t understand how to be a great teammate until I started acting,” he said. “With the arts, you can’t put a production on one guy’s shoulders. In sports, you can win with a hot goalie or a superstar who gets rolling. There’s more room for individual effort.
“You can’t make movies unless you’re a team, and everybody is really dialed in,” he added. “For me, it helped me really understand what a true collaboration was and being a great teammate.”
Elite athletes vs. elite actors
When it comes to the best of the best in both the arts and in sports, Avery shared an observation of Damon, who played Odyssus, while they were filming on a chilly day in Iceland.
“Everyone was cold, and the IMAX doesn’t give you the ability to run a lot of takes. I watched Matt do three takes in a row, and he made a minor little adjustment on each take,” he said. “It kind of just split my head open. It was like the first time you beat Zelda. I was just blown away at the efficiency, and how minimal of a tweak he made.”
Avery said to parallel that with sports, it felt like the inches you need to read a play before it happens, or a forward just cutting a corner before a defender turns on you. It was the repetition of watching the best actors make every scene a little bit of their own that was a “big eye opener” for him.
“If you have a day where you have dialogue, you should be able to say that dialogue if they throw you off a bridge with a bungee cord. Because then you’re loose, then you can do anything, then you can play,” he said. “But on the other side of it … we have a lot of days where do don’t have dialogue, but we’re in a cave and you’ve got to make it look real that a 60-foot cyclops just ate your friend. You’ve got to get into a certain mindset to get there.”
We asked Avery if the tools he used to get to that “certain mindset” were similar to the ones he employed during his NHL career, the ones that helped him become a nuisance, a pest, a rat, but most importantly: valuable.
“I was very unique because anytime I felt myself getting complacent, I would cause some sort of chaos because then I would have to defend it. Which, looking back on it, I wish that my process was a little bit different, because it would have gave me more opportunity,” he said.
“You do something for so long, you think that you’ve learned all of these things, but you were sort of in a box,” he added. “Sometimes, you had to psych yourself up to do something that you didn’t want to do, because ultimately, you were scared of doing something different. Which, in a team and the cohesion of something, you don’t get those opportunities.”
Finding vulnerability
When Avery described the experience of having worked with actors who have spent their entire lives trying to master their craft, the same way he spent the first chunk of his own life trying to become an elite athlete, he said there was no apprehension to work with him on their behalf.
He recounted the time spent with Matthew Gubler on the upcoming CBS production Einstein, and how he watched Gubler, who played Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds for more than 300 episodes, carry himself on set like a professional.
“This guy is a serious pro, and I think with a guy like that or other high-level people, if anything, they respect (my) previous craft, because they understand that to get to a high level, you have to be good,” he said. “The moment you walk on set and you know you’ve got your first opportunity to act, feels like for me, my fellow actors can feel my energy and go, ‘OK, I’m not going to have to worry about him. He’s pretty dialed in over there. This looks like it’s going to be fun.'”
Avery said during the filming of The Odyssey, he and his fellow actors formed their own form of cameraderie that was unique to what you’d find in the locker room.
“There was a lot of guys on this movie and we all became best friends, sort of out of necessity to survive — and also not get washed away … literally,” he said, referring to their scenes on a boat. He took a minute to pause and think, then provide what he observed as a major difference between his two careers.
“Maybe that’s something to do with the arts, like it’s just got a little bit more of a softer side to it,” he said. “Sports is, I don’t know, man … sports is, it’s like do-or-death. The stakes are really high. Not to say they’re not in film, but you get more time. You can go down 4-0, 5-0 because you know you have the whole afternoon to get back in the game after lunch. You don’t just have 20 minutes left. You can find a way to start clicking.”
Avery would later calling acting “a breath of fresh air, every single time,” due to the lack of rigidness that he found in professional sports.
“You need to be able to kind of weave and obviously be incredibly vulnerable, which is not really encouraged in a sports locker room. Being vulnerable is sort of frowned upon,” he said, adding that he was able to access that part of him through acting class and putting his reps in.
“A lot of is probably the wall I had up. So once you lose that wall, you’re all of a sudden open to collaboration. You’re open to somebody tapping into you and pushing you into a feeling that you weren’t really anticipating on using, or even touching,” he said. “That’s when it gets really fun, because then you’re in the ether, and you’re bouncing (ideas) around and you get to play. As long as the intentions are good, that’s what the job is. You feel safe, and you go, ‘Oh, this could be interesting.’
“It’s a real push and pull. It’s wild. It’s really heady.”
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