“Meet him at the lobby entrance at 1pm and you’ll recognize him :)”
These are the only instructions.
At 1 p.m., Benicio del Toro wanders, a little hesitantly, down the Beverly Hills peninsula. He has no entourage. He’s wearing a black windbreaker, an Oakland A’s cap pulled down over his shaggy hair and his famous sleepy eyes. At 6-foot-2, he is an unmissable presence in this gilded foyer. Then again, it’s Benicio del Toro. It would be unmissable in a snowstorm.
He scans the sunny parlour: Chanel-clad society ladies eating cucumber sandwiches, a harpist drifting off over afternoon tea. Then it veers into a dim, wood-paneled bar to the side and slides into the banquette.
“I’ll have a light beer,” I say to the bartender.
Del Toro doesn’t order a beer, leaving behind “a few little beers” — a reference to one of his drinks Battle after battle The character’s most famous lines — Dead in the water. He ordered a shot of espresso and looked at me with a slightly worried look.
“Beer? At one o’clock?” His eyes dart around the room. “How long will this interview take anyway?”
“Do you enjoy doing interviews?” I ask.
“Not real.”
It doesn’t come from a place of hostility. He explains that once something is spoken into the register, it separates the words from the context. Forever. “Sometimes you read it or see it, and it seems to you that this is not what I meant at all,” he says. “It shakes you up a little. It becomes…permanent.”
Del Toro is revered by a loose alliance of Hollywood’s most revered creatives: Scorsese. DiCaprio. Pennsylvania. Anderson (Paul and Wes). Soderbergh. Villeneuve. Despite this great reputation, del Toro resists easy categorization. Collaborators describe his talents as akin to superpower. The power of his presence manages to move scenes around him, and sometimes even entire films, all without raising his voice.
Sean Penn, who stars with del Toro One battlemet del Toro when he was a fresh-faced young man in his twenties, newly arrived in Los Angeles from his native Puerto Rico. He remembers that he immediately wanted to know what was happening “behind the eyes.” Of del Toro’s broad imagination, Penn says it works “in all capitals. You know you’re going to get what you need. But you have no idea what you’re going to get.”
For del Toro, unpredictability never expresses itself as flamboyance. His offers are rarely high. His greatest trick is quietly stealing scenes without having to chew up the furniture.
He broke out as a 28-year-old playing a marble-mouthed con man in 1995 The usual suspects. At 59 years old, he continues to captivate audiences with his uniquely human creations. Take Sensei’s role, the role he plays Battle after battlePaul Thomas Anderson’s epic of military oppression, the struggle and folly of revolution, and the instinct to protect the weak. It’s a low-scoring role that has put del Toro, to some extent, at the center of the awards conversation.
“It’s weird,” del Toro says of the interest that followed the film’s Sept. 8 world premiere. The film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for del Toro and Penn. The last time del Toro was nominated for an Oscar was more than two decades ago 21 grams. Three years earlier, he won the Best Supporting Actor award passage.
He insists on entering One battle With modest expectations. “I’m in the movie for a limited amount of time,” he says. “I’ve come to take Leo from point A to point D.”
“It is a great honor,” he adds. “It’s huge. But it’s so surprising. There’s something about it that makes me not want to believe it. And I’m trying to enjoy this wave.” He keeps coming back to that word: wave. Not a campaign, not a battle. wave. Something that lifts you up whether you deserve it or not. Something you better give yourself to.
“What I’ve learned about this is to let it rip. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing I can do,” he says.
“I think the film reflects where we are now,” he says of the answer to this question. One battlewhich moves at breakneck speed through a world of desperate immigrants, parents, children, and a father trying to reunite with his daughter.
“The coach represents the assistant,” he continues. “That’s the human side of all of us. Innocent until proven guilty. You see someone in need, you help them.”
***
In an early draft of Battle after battleSensei along with Leo’s character, former revolutionary Bob Ferguson, participated in a double murder inside his dojo, setting off a chain reaction of cover-up and escape. Del Toro refused. Not because of the violence, but because of what he felt was the lack of logic.
“What was my relationship with Leo up to that point in the movie?” He remembers scribbling in the margins. “I know his daughter. I shake his hand. He writes me a check. I deposit the check. That’s it.”
Committing murder on his behalf was wrong. “If I killed someone in my dojo, that’s a whole other movie,” he said.
Del Toro’s objection was practical. If you shoot someone in the head in a confined space, there’s blood, dirt, and bodies.
“It’s a big mess to clean up, especially if you shoot someone in the head with a shotgun,” he says, almost clinically. “Now we’re going to have to clean it up. We’re going to have to clean it up quickly. We’re going to have to get rid of the body.”
The film immediately becomes something else: a logistics thriller about evidence disposal. At one point, the idea of blowing up the dojo using controlled destruction was explored. None of it made sense to del Toro. What’s more, it added to what he felt was an underrated film.
“Benny planted this idea with me and Leo,” Anderson explains in an email. “It was a very good idea that led to significantly more dramatic possibilities regarding his character and the overall look of the film.”
For example, the segment set in Bactan Cross, a fictional frontier town located in the real El Paso, culminates in a raid there. This sequence has frustrated Anderson for a long time.
“He was constantly changing and never finding his calling,” the director says. Until Benny suggested “putting a Latin Harriet Tubman,” referring to the pivot that saw Sensei become the head of an ambitious immigrant smuggling operation. “And that made everything fall into place.”
Instead of provoking violence, del Toro suggested that Sensei would calmly carry the families through danger. Therefore, his personality will become a protector, not an instigator. In the meantime, the dojo will become a refuge.
“Being in El Paso, an immigration hub, has given us a lot of physical and local talent to work with,” Anderson says. “It became the focus of the film and definitely the best time I ever had at work.”
The rewrite recalibrated the film’s moral center of gravity. Sensei stopped serving as a plot accelerator and began to gain more thematic importance. He becomes, in a quiet, unshowy way, the film’s moral compass.
Del Toro attacks each role in this way: script in one hand, pen in the other. “You are a translator,” he says of his acting style. “If you don’t understand the writer, you can’t do it.” Once he understands the story, he starts asking questions—dozens, even hundreds of them. What will happen next? Where did the bag go? Why is he angry?
Anderson says he wrote the role of Sensei for Del Toro, who worked with the director in 2014 Inherent vice. When scheduling conflicts arise One battleAnderson delayed production for three months to accommodate Del Toro’s availability. “I’ve never done this before,” Anderson says. “But it was a very good use of our budget. The question I had in mind at the time was: ‘How can we not wait for Benicio?’” There simply was no world in which I made the film without him.
***
Del Toro is fresh from the Berlin set Phoenician plan With 10 days between projects. He attended his daughter’s sixth-grade graduation, then entered a fast-moving production that was full speed on track. The transformation was sudden.
“I had 10 days to unpack and pack,” he says of the 2024 shoot “I get out my character in the movie Wes and then dress up like a coach and go. You don’t have time to adapt. If you want to jump on a rollercoaster, you generally want time to run, catch up, and then hop on. “There was none of that.”
His first day of filming was inside a real store in El Paso. There were no representatives behind the counter, just the family that owned it. Anderson put DiCaprio and del Toro in charge of communicating with non-actors. “You guys are in charge,” del Toro recalled Anderson telling them. “There’s a family here. They own the store.”
Del Toro went behind the counter and opened the register.
“And there’s real money from the store. I’m taking the money from there. And the lady is sitting right next to me. She’s looking at me like that,” he said, widening his eyes. “Then I put it back when Paul said ‘cut.’ But that was her money, not the support money.”
The immediacy, the truth, the immersion – all created an instant connection between del Toro, DiCaprio and the locals. She also reunited with Del Toro and DiCaprio — megawatt stars who have been friends in the industry since sharing a cover Vanity galleryThe 1996 Hollywood Affair – in a deeper, more meaningful way.
“All of a sudden, there was this relationship between the non-actors and Leo,” del Toro recalls. “Leo and I talked a little bit about it. We were in charge here. This was our show. These non-actors were looking to us to see what to do.” “So for Leo and I, our heads were immediately pointed in the same direction — it was a bonding moment.”
Penn, who plays the evil Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw, a special with del Toro and DiCaprio. The program opened with a collection of career highlights for each actor. Ben found himself amazed as he relived each performance.
Del Toro evokes the rock screen giants of the past, paying tribute to American grit and masculinity such as Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood. The last two were his late father’s favorites.
“There’s a part of you that never leaves the theater seat where you were 17,” Ben says. “You’re watching your heroes out there. And then, all of a sudden, you’re sitting next to people who have become that to someone else.”
***
Growing up in del Toro’s family in Puerto Rico, there was an expectation that he would become a lawyer. Benicio’s grandfather practiced law, his father practiced law, and his mother passed law.
Benicio was an rambunctious and creative child. Then, when he was nine years old, his mother died of hepatitis.
Nine is an unforgiving age. It is old enough to remember the feel of a voice, the smell of someone’s hair, but too young to build any real architecture of grief.
“I’m still processing it,” del Toro says. “I’ve had my mother for nine years. What’s crazy about losing a parent at that age is that there hasn’t been a single day in my life that I haven’t thought about her.”
Years later, del Toro had the opportunity to meet one of his heroes: Japanese director Kaneto Shindo, whose classics include Bare island and Onibaba.
Shindo was 96 years old when del Toro met him. Del Toro conducted background research and learned that the director lost his mother at the age of nine, just as del Toro had. It is also learned that Shindo, 72, has made a film about her.
“So I asked him because we understood each other in terms of that particular scar,” del Toro says. “And I asked him, ‘Did that help deal with that pain? To make the movie. Did it cure something? Did it fix something?'”
Shindou sat quietly for several seconds.
“Nothing at all,” he said.
Del Toro laughs softly when he retells it, not because it’s funny, but because it’s so specific. When asked what he remembered about his mother, he said: “I remember everything.” She was strict, loving and committed to education. In a phrase that sounds like a joke and then segues into something more profound, he says, “I think some of my best acting was with her.”
Del Toro’s father remarried after his mother’s death, and del Toro describes that period as chaotic. He was active, restless, distracted, the type who could disappear for a few hours and come back just before the consequences occurred. He has a brother who is two years older than him. He says the loss brought them closer together, but they coped differently.
“My brother, Gustavo, was a little bit quieter,” he says. “He read more than me. I didn’t read much when I was young. I was very distracted.”
Gustavo, a physician, eventually settled in Brooklyn, where he now serves as chief medical officer of a major hospital. Benicio lives in Brentwood, where he shares his daughter’s parents with Kimberly Stewart, Rod’s daughter. The two never married, nor were they ever involved in any kind of public relationship. Beyond that, details are sparse. In a coup for today’s Hollywood, del Toro maintains an iron grip on his personal life.
At the age of thirteen, he was sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. She described this step as an opportunity. His godmother hoped it would lead to law school. It was instead recorded as a rupture. The island’s humidity gave way to colds that penetrated moth-eaten jackets. The Spanish language receded into the background.
Puerto Rico has not diminished in memory; It simply remained a faint pulse beating beneath everything new. When del Toro returns to the island now, about once a year, he is hit by a tidal wave of emotions. He resists the suggestion that Puerto Rican identity and American identity should be in opposition. “You can be both,” he says.
He talks about the Puerto Rican situation with the candor of someone who has explained it many times and still manages to find it ridiculous.
He points out that Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since 1917, and under US control since 1898. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. However, if you reside on the island, you cannot vote for president. You have no representation in Congress.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he says frankly.
Del Toro attended business school at the University of California, San Diego. Halfway through his first semester, he was selected for a production of a one-act play called an act By Sam Shepard. He was fascinated by Shepard’s lean, volatile writing and the wounded masculinity at its core. “So I changed my major to drama,” he says. “And that’s when I burned the ships, so to speak. I just said, ‘That’s it.’ “I will become an actor.”
When entering the world of professional acting, he says, there were stereotypes. If you are Latino, you have been offered shorthand. And you got jobs because you needed to work.
“But my attitude has always been that I should be able to play anything,” he says. “And if they all had to have a last name that ended in ‘O’, I would make them different. Because not all Latinos are the same.”
***
Del Toro is a father. His role as protector in One battle It seems less theoretical in this light. When asked if Sensei’s instinct to protect father and daughter was related to his own life, he paused, hesitant to talk about his daughter. It focuses on something more universal.
“There’s something about people’s altruism,” he says. “When someone risks their life to save another, we applaud.”
He talks about footage we see constantly now, on our phones, of strangers jumping into danger to save someone they do not know. A child withdraws from the current. Saving a person from a burning car. A stranger protecting another stranger from harm.
“We all applaud,” he says. “We’ll make him a hero right away. A star. Go talk to Oprah. Take the tour.” It stops. “They’re not doing it for the reward. It’s an instinct. It’s a human thing.”
This is sensei. Good Samaritan. And in a film that’s almost unjustly dark, his instinct becomes a beacon. The reference that the film did not give away to people. Because Sensei didn’t abandon them.
“I think there’s been a lot of common sense in recent months,” del Toro says.
At that moment, a loud-mouthed woman sits at a nearby table and says something about venture capital or divorce, maybe both. Dale T was shaken From his thinking.
It doesn’t glare. He studies women with anthropological interest.
“That lady,” he says quietly.
Del Toro leans back into the banquet, his eyes half closed, listening the way he listens to everything.
“Ocean waves,” he says suddenly.
Another explosion from the next table. He laughed too loudly for the room.
Del Toro shrugs.
“Ocean waves. Ocean waves.”
He nodded. She stands. Sets the Oakland A’s cap. The lobby is still buzzing. The screaming woman still narrates her own significance.
Del Toro slips without contest.
Ocean waves.
This story appeared in the February 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
