126 Esquire — June 2018
he is a big man, brawny but not bullish,
despite the name. There’s a deftness to him,
a delicacy. He treads lightly, moves swiftly
without seeming to hurry. First he’s here,
then he’s over there. How did he do that? He
comes in through the back, or round the side,
and goes out some other way, vanishes almost.
Each time I met him for this article, on three
consecutive days in Los Angeles, in April, he
arrived and departed with as much fanfare as
a breath of wind. Where he came from and
where he went? Hard to say.
Benicio Del Toro played basketball to a high
standard in his youth. His boyhood bedroom
wall, in Miramar, Puerto Rico, was a hall of fame
of posters of his favourite players. For a time, he
was even talented enough to dream of a career
as a pro. Without knowing much of the game,
you can see that he must have been a frustrat-
ing opponent, occupying the unseen spaces of
the court, entering unexpectedly into the action,
conjuring a dazzling piece of skill — a pass made
with disguise, a shot from nowhere — before
dematerialising again, points made.
Instead of basketball he pursued acting, and
he brings that mercurial, shapeshiting qualiy
to his performances. Not for him the dramatic
entrance. He comes at things sideways, unan-
nounced, so that you might not notice him at
first, edging into a scene. And then he pulls one
of his moves and, as they might say in basket-
ball: boom.
For three decades on screen he has played
men of few words but decisive actions
— intense, diident, enigmatic men. Men who
speak sotly and carry a big gun. He has been
Che Guevara and Pablo Escobar. He has played
an assortment of tough guys with dark pasts,
conflicted cops or criminals (or both) mixed up
in drugs or the so-called war on drugs. Look
at him: he’s hardly likely to be ofered an over-
wrought wedding planner or a brittle mas-
seuse, though people might pay good money to
see him take on either (or both).
Sean Penn, with whom he has worked on
three films, describes Del Toro as “a major art-
ist in the crat... arguably unparalleled in his
inventiveness of character”. He is known to
strip back his dialogue, removing lines from
the script rather than adding them, preferring
acting over exposition, allowing his characters
to develop through body language, express-
ing himself through gesture as much as sound.
When he does speak, in some of his most
famous performances, it’s in Spanish (Traic,
Che), or some other language of his own inven-
tion (he Usual Suspects). Doesn’t mater. Even
when you can’t hear a word, you catch his drit.
In person he’s laconic, certainly. But not ret-
icent. When the mood takes him, he’s a talker:
thoughtful, warm and funny. And, as you might
expect, he has charisma to burn.
My conversations with him for this arti-
cle took place in a sun-dappled nook, shielded
by palm trees, at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in
West Hollywood; over a lunch of Cajun chicken
and vitamin juice in a booth at an old-fash-
ioned neighbourhood restaurant, a regular
haunt near his home on the west side of LA;
and between set-ups in a studio in Hollywood,
where photos of him were taken for Esquire.
None of these occasions was the first time
I’d met Del Toro. That was 17 years ago, in
the summer of 2001, when I interviewed him
in New York, over vodka and cranberry juice‘I’ve played every angle on the drugs’:
in the forthcoming Sicario 2: Soldado,
the sequel to the gripping 2015 thriller,
Del Toro returns as Alejandro Gillick,
a former prosecutor hell-bent on
revenge against Mexico’s drug cartels