Recently, Benicio Del Toro realised that he’s a sprinter.
He’s always identified with athletes — the rigorous training, the full-body commitment, the pitiless tug-of-war between ability and dumb luck. As an actor in movies like The Usual Suspects, Traffic and, in a recent galactic detour, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and a pair of Avengers films, he’s been a strikingly economical player, if not always the most valuable one, averaging an unusually high ratio of memorable moments to minutes on screen.
But it wasn’t until a recent endurance test that Del Toro understood what kind of athlete that made him. He was filming Escape at Dannemora, an eight-part miniseries for Showtime and his first television role in more than two decades. The shoot stretched nearly seven months.
“It was a marathon,” he recalled on the other side of it, in an interview at Sony’s Manhattan tower late last month. “I had to learn to pull back and to breathe, or else I was going to explode.”
The lesson may prove useful. The Showtime miniseries and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, an unlikely sequel to his bracing 2015 thriller, out now in the UAE, inaugurate a new era of longevity for Del Toro’s on-screen personas, suggesting that his extensive career may yet find a new gear.
They also mark a weightier achievement: Del Toro, who was born in Puerto Rico, is one of only a few Latinos to headline a franchise released by Hollywood, where Hispanic actors must often settle for supporting parts, when they exist at all.
At 51, he is tall and broad with an unruly pile of jet-black hair, sunken cheeks and eyelids that stay partly shuttered, as if guarding a loose flame. He has an air of quiet sensitivity and a slightly adenoidal voice suggesting an off-hours version of the antiheroes and rogues he has embodied on film.
Since his breakout performance in The Usual Suspects in 1995, as a minor character whom he turned into an indelibly marble-mouthed mystery man, Del Toro has sprinted his way through gritty ensemble fare, including Snatch, 21 Grams and Sin City, blazing trails that still smouldered long after he’d delivered his last line.
A best-supporting Oscar for Traffic (2000) did not turn him into a boldface name overnight, but he rambled towards a quiet kind of leading-man status, which he flexed opposite Halle Berry in Things We Lost in the Fire (2007), and in the two-part Che Guevara biopic Che (2008) — a passion project that he also produced.
If audiences are still more likely to recognise Del Toro as an intriguing side than as a main course, his character in the Sicario films is notably something in between the two, both the hit man of the film’s Spanish title and a near mythical figure who manages to be more feared than seen.
“He represents the rage against the violence of the drug war — the evil of it,” Del Toro said of the character, an inexhaustibly vengeful soldier of fortune known in the films as Alejandro. “He’s a victim of the drug cartels, and so he’s become completely callous, like an ice cube.”
Few expected Sicario to return. The original film, which also starred Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin, was a haunting, R-rated meditation on moral ambiguity and unremitting violence across the Texas-Mexico border. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it had the mood and pacing of art-house fare and the box office debut to match, grossing just $12 million (Dh44 million) domestically on its opening weekend.
“There was no talk of a sequel when we were shooting the original,” Del Toro said. “But it was one of those things where I thought: Why not? Let’s go.”
Day of the Soldado follows Alejandro and Brolin’s character, a cocksure government bulldog, on a mission to incite a war between drug cartels in Mexico. Del Toro and Brolin anchor the film — neither Blunt nor Villeneuve returned — and were unusually empowered, in collaboration with a new director, Stefano Sollima, to take liberties with the script.
Scenes were expanded or discarded; subplots and transitions were created on the fly, and Del Toro, as he has throughout his career, endowed his character with vivid and imaginative details.
Del Toro’s innovations extended to the arcs of other characters in the story, including one who helps Alejandro survive while on the lam. At Del Toro’s suggestion, that character was rewritten as a deaf man who communicates in sign language, leading to an unexpected revelation — also conceived by Del Toro — about Alejandro’s back story.
In another instance, Del Toro re-imagined an early execution scene, deciding on a ferocious, rapid-fire shooting style for his character in which one index finger, turned palm-side down, is repeatedly rammed against the trigger of a pistol. The result played so well on camera that it was used in the movie’s trailer and became a meme.
Del Toro, who lives in Los Angeles and has a six-year-old daughter with socialite Kimberly Stewart, infuses his character work with shards of personal history. DJ, the mercenary hacker he played in The Last Jedi, had a distinctive stutter that Del Toro said was based on that of his father (fan theories about its greater symbolism not withstanding). “We used to imitate him behind his back,” Del Toro said, meaning him and his brother, Gustavo, now a doctor in Brooklyn.
His father, who still lives in Puerto Rico, was an indirect source for the execution scene in Day of the Soldado, too. Del Toro got the idea for the rapid-fire method years ago, after seeing someone use it at a shooting range.
“I grew up with guns,” he said, recalling shooting bottle targets with the elder Del Toro on his family’s farm in Puerto Rico. “My father was in the military and my grandfather was a cop — I had a respect for guns, but also an understanding of how dangerous they can be.”
Del Toro has often played violent characters who shoot to kill, many of them on one side of the drug war or the other. He’s sanguine about his reputation — “Humphrey Bogart, Al Pacino and Denzel Washington also played a lot of bad guys,” he said.
For Del Toro, that has sometimes pit his desire to excel as an actor against a competing impulse to challenge negative stereotypes, a predicament faced by many actors of colour. Del Toro said that he decided to focus only on how well a character is written and on the merits of the filmmakers involved.
“If I have to pick between breaking the stereotype and going for the good part, I’m always going to go for the good part,” he said. “I just think the good part is always going to be more satisfying. And I have my own life — I can make sure to break the stereotype there.”
