Esquire — June 2018 129Alamy | Rex
flipping through their record collection.
At length, he remembers a use for his phone,
besides making calls. “Wikipedia!” he says, mar-
velling, as only us analogue creatures can, at all
those facts at his fingertips, all those stories.
If character can be revealed in details — and
movies and plays (and maybe even Wikipedia)
say that it can — here are some more details I
collected. He drives a faded old American 4x4,
and he has a classic Seventies car, too, a Ford
LTD, the same car as his dad had when he was
a kid. (“It’s a diferent ride. It’s like you’re flying
low, close to the ground. American cars now,” he
says, mournfully, “they all drive like Europeans.”)
He wears a Philadelphia 76ers baseball cap
and wraparound shades. (He was wearing
a Philadelphia 76ers T-shirt at our first meeting,
in 2001. Wraparound shades, too. And he sang
me a Rolling Stones’ song: “Doo Doo Doo Doo
Doo (Heartbreaker)”, from Goat’s Head Soup.) His
stragly beard is flecked with grey. His hair is
thick as a forest. He is unfailingly polite with
waiters and patient with interviewers.
He lives alone. “Not every night,” he says.
Is he not lonely? “By the time I feel lonely
I’m asleep.”
This is an uncharacteristically flippant
answer. He reconsiders. “here’s more people
living alone now than ever in history. And they
put the fear on you: ‘Ah, you’re gonna be alone.’
I don’t want to be alone. No one wants to be
alone. But I’m a litle bit of a loner.”
He has never been married. Would he like
to try it? “I don’t understand it, necessarily.”
Has he ever come close? “I’ve been in love.
Yeah, I’ve been in love several times.” But,
“A lot of times when you’ve started having
a relationship with someone and you fall in
love, you’re very vulnerable, so you become
unstable really quick and that causes all kinds
of drama, and that’s not good.”
Sometimes, he allows, he is envious of male
friends who are married. His brother Gustavo
is married, and Benicio speaks admiringly of
that relationship, how mutually supportive it is.
“It would be stupid of me to be closed to
that,” he says. “But I don’t feel like I’m unhappy.
I’m not. I’m stable, I’m good.”
He has a daughter, Delilah, six years old.
He mentions her frequently in conversation, as
proud fathers of young children tend to do. Her
mother is Kimberly Stewart, daughter of Rod
and his first wife, Alana Hamilton.
Would he have another child?
“Life has taught me that you can’t say
never,” he says. “I don’t know what the future
will bring. I’m not with the mother of my
daughter, and we have a good understanding
of what happened and I’m grateful, but if I was
having another kid I would have to be with the
mother. I don’t want to have a kid just to have
a kid. I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.”subscriptions to Mojo and Uncut.
He reads books, too, paper ones, an eclec-
tic assortment of old books and older books.
Latest discoveries: Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying
(“the ‘zipless fuck’... awesome”), and HG Wells.
He’s recently completed seven months
shooting a TV series — Escape at Dannemora,
directed by Ben Stiller, based on the true story
of a famous 2015 prison break (he plays a mur-
derer) — but don’t go to him for updates on your
favourite show. Instead, he watches old movies.
Brolin: “I go, ‘What you been doing?’ He
goes, ‘I’ve been watching old movies.’ I go,
‘That’s what you did yesterday?’ He goes,
‘No, that’s what I did for the last month.’ And
I know that he means it. He’s literally been inthe dark for 30 days, just watching old movies
and eating Doritos.”
Only once in the time we spent together
did I see Del Toro consult his phone. hat was
to check the time. When I asked him if he was
on social media, he looked at me like I’d sug-
gested he might be a secret morris dancer.
Facebook? Blank stare. Twitter? Mystified
glare. Instagram? Zip.
He doesn’t want to come across like one
of those grizzled curmudgeons who think
everything was beter in their day. “No! I used
to hear that from my dad! Listen, you can’t
fight it. We’re the old ones now. You can’t judge
the young. The young should judge us!” But
still... you could learn a lot about a person by‘My life has influenced every character that I play.
And by that I mean my experiences, my upbringing,
the things I went through as a human being... hat’s
the first thing I go to with every role’