132 Esquire — June 2018
way of walking and moving. “he way we dey
graviy, that’s very similar.” hey share a love
of sport — his dad never missed a basketball
game — but they didn’t always see eye to eye.
And while his brother Gustavo, two years
older, was more likely to toe the line, Benicio
was full of mischief. (Gustavo, to whom he
remains close has been equally successful in
America: a doctor, he is chief medical oicer, as
well as executive vice-president, at a teaching
hospital in Brooklyn).
“If you didn’t think like him,” Del Toro says
of his father, "there was a problem. He could get
angry. Right now? His atitude? he neighbours
would have called the police pleny of times.
“I got whupped by him many times,” Del
Toro says, “but I wasn’t the only one get-
ting whupped. All of my friends were geting
whupped! hat’s how it was. He would get the
belt, or get in your fucking face: ‘Ra! Ra! Ra!’
“he thing about it,” he says, “was that, had
he done that and not been there, that could
be a problem. But he was there for every din-
ner, every breakfast. And I knew that he was
right 90 per cent of the time. I think there was
a sense that I wanted some atention from him
and I got it in the rawest form. I got it right in
the vein.”
Not too long after their mother died,
Gustavo and Benicio’s father remarried. As
he entered adolescence, the younger Del Toro
began to strugle.
“My mom had passed away, my dad had
remarried, I was a litle bit depressed,” he says.
“Never did I feel depressed. But when you
look back, my grades were going down. When
you’re in a communiy, sociey starts to brand
you. I got a reputation: class clown.”
Enter perhaps the most significant person
in young Benicio’s life, outside his immediate
family. Sarah Torres Peralta was a successful
lawyer and had been a close friend of Benicio’s
mother. She was also his godmother.
“My godmother carried a lot of the pain
that we were going through from my mom
dying,” he says “She had this connection with
my brother and I. I think she understood some-
how, much more than my dad understood, the
big picture of what was going on.”
One day, when he was 13, she asked him if
he’d like to transfer to a school in the US. He
said he would. hat same day he was on a plane,
heading to Mercersburg Academy, a private
boarding school in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Torres Peralta took a chance on him. “he
high school I went to was expensive. She paid
the bills.” Later, she helped fund both brothers
through their college years.
“I got really lucy with my godmother,” Del
Toro says. “She was the one who said: ‘Go big.’”
He drops his voice to an impassioned whisper:
“‘Why not go big?’”
he was always funny. He did a Mick Jager
impression, as a kid, that made people laugh.
Maybe it was this that prompted Gustavo to
sugest that his brother might make an actor
one day — a statement that still seems shock-
ing to Del Toro, coming as it did so completely
out of the blue. heir mother had had an inter-
est in the arts, and nourished in her second
son a love of painting. heir father read poetry.
All the Del Toro men loved the cinema, espe-
cially Westerns: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood.
Young Benicio liked “monster movies” whichDel Toro’s portrayal of the
Argentine revolutionary in Steven
Soderbergh’s Che (2008), below,
earned him the Best Actor award
at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
Traic (2000), right, was the first
collaboration between Soderbergh
and Del Toro, who won the Oscar
for Best Supporting Actor for his
portrayal of a Mexican cop