Benicio Del Toro specializes in meaty roles
Jaime Jeske
Actor Benicio del Toro Specializes in Putting the Meat on a Role
By Alona Wartofsky
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 15, 2003; Page C01
NEW YORK
By most accounts, actor Benicio Del Toro is a perfectionist. He badgers
directors and screenwriters with questions. He's not shy about
suggesting scene changes. For him, characters, dialogue and plot must be
credible. In Hollywood, he is regarded as a prodigiously talented
actor -- he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in
"Traffic" -- and as an intense artist with unusually high standards.
He is also known as a mumbler.
Del Toro, 36, first gained notice in 1995 as the marble-mouthed hood
Fred Fenster in "The Usual Suspects." Since then, he has played a range
of entrancingly eccentric characters. Not all of them mumble, but many
do, and their word-swallowing serves to draw you in -- you really want
to know what they're saying. (Del Toro's garbling has become a trademark
of sorts. When his "Snatch" costar Brad Pitt delivered incomprehensible
lines in that film, critics hailed his performance as a homage to Del
Toro.)
The actor mumbles in real life, too. Smoking too many cigarettes in a
hotel suite here, where he is promoting his new film, "The Hunted," Del
Toro is talking about why he puts so much pressure on himself. "Maybe
I'm competitive with myself," he says. "I'm not competitive with other
people. I'm competitive with myself."
This can be stressful, he adds. Then he points to his head and says that
he is going to Hawaii.
You're going to Hawaii?
He shakes his head and smiles. Leaning forward but looking away, he says
it again, this time gesturing in the direction of his graying hair: "I'm
going white. Go. Ing. White."
For someone who has built a career playing what William Friedkin,
director of "The Hunted," has described as "extreme characters," Del
Toro doesn't seem *too* bizarre.
Posing for pictures, he jokes with the photographer. ("Do you like to
smile?" she asks. His reply: "Give me a reason.")
He is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt under a baggy sweater. His
sideburns are long and scruffy, as is his slightly goaty goatee. A green
"Memphis Music" baseball cap accentuates hazel eyes. There's a chunky
silver bracelet on his left wrist. He also wears a creepy-looking silver
ring shaped like the face of a screaming monkey. His sweater looks like
Armani -- and except for that, he wouldn't look out of place behind the
counter of a record store.
With his high cheekbones, sleepy eyes and cool, laid-back demeanor, Del
Toro is admired by every last woman on the planet. But the film industry
hasn't really explored his potential as a leading man. An exception is
"Excess Baggage," a 1997 caper that paired him with then-girlfriend
Alicia Silverstone, one of several actresses he's been linked with
off-screen. But even in that comedy, he was not a conventional romantic
hero: He played a car thief who accidentally abducts her.
In "The Hunted," which also stars Tommy Lee Jones and opened yesterday,
Del Toro plays a psychologically damaged U.S. military assassin who
disappears, and then resurfaces in the Pacific Northwest, where he
embarks on a killing spree that is definitely not sanctioned by the
government. It took Friedkin several months to persuade Del Toro to
accept the role. The process involved a series of discussions among Del
Toro, Friedkin and a screenwriter, aimed at fleshing out Del Toro's
character.
"The character was a little bit one-dimensional when I came into the
picture. The first draft was more" -- Del Toro makes a weird wheezing
sound -- "blood on his fingers, just 'I kill you and I eat little
children.' He was just a bad guy, nothing to it, and it evolved into
being something. . . . We don't know if he's just bad, [he's] more like
Frankenstein. I don't think Frankenstein the monster is just a bad guy."
Not all directors would appreciate Del Toro's approach, but Friedkin
welcomed the actor's passion. "I know several directors who would
consider the interest that Benicio takes in the script and the dialogue
as well as the story as a sort of meddling," he says by phone. "There
aren't a lot of actors who do that. . . . Benicio is much more serious
about the craft."
Connie Nielsen, who plays an FBI agent pursuing Del Toro's character,
praises the prickly energy the actor brings to the film. "You can sense
he is just a little suspended in some kind of tension," she says. "It's
not a bad thing, but it's this kind of interesting, just slight tension.
It makes you think of a feline."
Friedkin says Del Toro's intelligence sets him apart. "His outstanding
feature is his instinct, but the instinct is based on a lot of
thoughtfulness, a lot of research, and a total dedication to his craft,"
says the director.
"The guy is one of the finest American actors working right how," he
adds. "I can say he's one of the very best young actors of his
generation. And then I'm hard put to name the others."
'Traffic' Cop
Del Toro won his Oscar for the role of Javier Rodriguez, a cagey Mexican
cop navigating his way between drug cartels and government corruption in
Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic."
For an actor who has spent so many films relegated to secondary roles,
the recognition was gratifying. "It's some sort of watermark," says Del
Toro. "And it's great for the people around you, too, who have been
supporting you through thick and thin. You get a chance almost to tell
them: 'See, you were right for sticking around.' "
There are other benefits, too. "Maybe the most important thing that you
get from that thing is . . . you can get hold of the reins of your
career, which is very difficult as an actor. I mean the difference
between me [now and] five years ago, 10 years ago, it's huge," he says.
"And I think that people might listen, you know, when I'm in a movie and
I might have a point, they might listen just a little bit more -- or a
little bit longer."
Del Toro describes the experience of making "Traffic" as "almost like
being at the right place at the right time." Director Soderbergh was
open to the actor's ideas. "We had collaborated really well," says Del
Toro. "It had been a while since a director was so . . . encouraging or
understanding of my questioning of the character and the script."
Before filming began, Del Toro insisted on going to a dialogue coach; he
was reared speaking Puerto Rican Spanish, and he wanted his accent to be
authentic. Another Del Toro suggestion that Soderbergh welcomed was
presenting Javier as essentially honest, a decision Del Toro hails as
"busting stereotypes."
"Not everybody south of the border is a dope dealer," he says. "There's
people south of the border, many people, that try to do the right thing.
They believe in the right thing, too. I think it was important to show
that."
Del Toro knows a little about ethnic stereotypes. Two years ago, when he
was interviewed by Talk magazine, he described growing up listening to
the Rolling Stones. "No Ricky Martin?" asked his interviewer, referring
to the Puerto Rican pop star.
"When I was growing up, Ricky Martin was with Menudo," Del Toro notes.
He is smirking. "She should have asked me if I liked Menudo."
Growing Pains
Del Toro, who now lives in Los Angeles, was born in Santurce, Puerto
Rico, where his parents were both lawyers. His mother died when he was
9, which may have had something to do with the tough exterior he
projected at school. "You see it with kids. You see a teenager and . . .
he will present himself in a way that is like, oh, *troublemaker*,
*dumb*. But sometimes you can see behind the wall. I think a lot of
teachers in my high school saw me like that. But there were a few that
saw beyond, read between the lines."
Del Toro's father also had a farm, and he expected Benicio to help out.
"I was forced to get up at freaking 4 o'clock in the morning and go to
the farm and deal with the pigs or deal with the cows. . . . I hated
it," says Del Toro. "I'm talking seventh grade. Everybody was going to
the beach or to parties, hanging out at night, and I was stuck with the
mosquitoes and the farm. . . . I wasn't too happy."
As is so often the case, adolescent misery led to introspection and
creativity. "When I look back, I think that it was almost really good,"
he says. "I would create these worlds in my head because I just didn't
want to be there, all kinds of worlds, you know."
This, he thinks, was the beginning of his eventual interest in acting.
"Solitude can do wonders," he says. "Spending time by yourself in a
corner forces you to investigate inside yourself."
Tensions between Benicio and his father worsened after his dad
remarried. "We'd just [expletive] like get into an argument. I'd just
take to the mountain, and just sit there under a tree, and 'I ain't
going back there to work. [Expletive] him. . . . I'm [expletive] gonna
shrink him, and if he was my size, I'd beat the [expletive] out of him.'
"
When he was 13, his father sent him to a boarding school in
Pennsylvania. There, Del Toro developed his interests in oil painting
and basketball. "I like that you have to think. I like that there's
action. And there's tension," he says of the game. "You have to see the
big picture when you play. Sometimes you have to anticipate. I do that
when I work."
At 16, he took a summer job selling passion fruit juice on a beach in
Puerto Rico. "But no one wants to drink passion fruit juice unless you
mix it with rum, so I had to perform to have 'em buy 'em from me. So I
would do a dance or whatever," he says. "I would shake it."
Del Toro attended the University of California at San Diego. He hoped to
study painting, but that major wasn't offered, so he signed up for
business instead. After he tried an acting class, he changed his major
to theater. Soon he left school and moved to New York, where he slept on
a cousin's couch and studied at Circle in the Square Theatre School.
Even after he was awarded a scholarship to the Stella Adler Conservatory
of Acting, his father disapproved of acting as a profession. But Del
Toro went anyway, and he still hasn't stopped saying "I told you so" to
his father.
"I do all the time," he says. "I say, 'People in London say your last
name, man. Not because of you, because of me.' "
Independent Spirit
His first performances on TV included an appearance on an episode of
"Miami Vice." In 1988, he made his film debut in "Big Top Pee-Wee,"
playing a tiny part: Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in a traveling circus. He
was fanged and furry-faced, and he barked and howled.
Del Toro looked better in the role of a Latino henchman in the James
Bond thriller "License to Kill," which came out the following year.
During his audition for that film, says Del Toro, producer Albert
"Cubby" Broccoli fell asleep. "Then he woke up and he asked me, how tall
are you? I said, 6-foot-2. . . . And I got the job."
His first real recognition came several years later, when his
scene-stealing turn in "The Usual Suspects" earned him an Independent
Spirit Award for best supporting actor. Making Fenster incomprehensible
was Del Toro's idea. "If you read the script, the only reason why my
character was in the script was to die. He didn't say anything. He
didn't do anything that affected the plot in any way," he says. "So I
said, 'Hey, we can do anything with this. And [director] Bryan Singer
and [screenwriter] Chris McQuarrie were fearless enough to allow me to
run with the ball."
He won the same award the following year for his role as the
philosophical roommate of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in Julian
Schnabel's "Basquiat." After that, he played a flamboyant gangster in
Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral." The character was inspired by Del Toro's
visit to a bar in Queens frequented by Italian toughs.
"It was like I just walked into an audition," he recalls. " 'GoodFellas'
had just come out. . . . What blew me away was that everybody in there
was imitating Joe Pesci and De Niro in 'GoodFellas.' . . . So my idea
for the character in 'The Funeral' was, this guy was imitating Paul Muni
or Jimmy Cagney because he went to the movies."
One of Del Toro's favorite roles -- the bloated Dr. Gonzo in "Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas," Terry Gilliam's much-reviled 1998 adaptation of
Hunter S. Thompson's travelogue-cum-rant -- proved to be the actor's
biggest disappointment.
"The critics hated it," Del Toro recalls. "They didn't understand how we
stayed very true to the book. They criticized us the same way they
probably criticized the [book]. Like they didn't read between the lines,
they just got face value. And if you look at that movie face value, you
got two drunken guys just destroying a room. What's interesting about
that? But if you read between the lines, they're making a statement.
"They harass everybody that is like the silent majority. . . . It was
like '71, '72. The '60s had come to a dead end. . . . These guys are
angry. *Fear and loathing*."
Del Toro had gained more than 40 pounds for the role -- "if you eat 16
doughnuts a day, you'll put on two to three pounds a day" -- and losing
the weight was arduous. Soon after, Salma Hayek asked him whether he
would consider gaining weight for the role of Diego Rivera in her Frida
Kahlo biopic. "I said, 'You know what, I'm really not interested in
gaining weight for another movie.' "
The drug-crazed Gonzo, who spends most of his screen time either puking
or bellowing in a bathtub filled with foul water, is bloated and
repulsive. Perhaps Del Toro's performance was too good. "People thought
I had gained the weight, not because of a movie, but because I'd just
gone off the bend," he says. "I'm not lying. My agent could tell you
that people didn't want to see me because they said I had a drinking
problem or a drug problem after that movie."
Once "Fear and Loathing" was released, Del Toro got a call from Hunter
S. Thompson. "He liked it, but he said my career was over. He was right
for a little while. He said, 'You're not going to be hired for a little
while,' and he was absolutely right," says Del Toro.
"He said people are gonna look at you like you're demented and you've
lost it," he adds. "Which is kind of a compliment."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Jaime
Salome
From: "Jaime Jeske" jaim...@cox-internet.com
Date: Sun, Mar 16, 2003 3:57 PM
Message-id: <v7a2l2t...@corp.supernews.com>
Building Character
Actor Benicio del Toro Specializes in Putting the Meat on a Role
By Alona Wartofsky
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 15, 2003; Page C01
NEW YORK
By most accounts, actor Benicio Del Toro is a perfectionist. He badgers
directors and screenwriters with questions. He's not shy about
suggesting scene changes. >>
How I love thee, let me count the ways...
*sigh*
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"I'm gonna guess it was political science, but I'm not sure, it might have been
history. I'll check. I hadn't thought of that one."
--Presidential hopeful Carol Moseley Braun, when asked what she majored in
during college