Esquire — June 2018 133Rex
canary yellow. And I was pissed. And basically
this scene was: you’re lucy you got it back in
the first place. He had this one line: ‘Don’t ever
come back here again.’ And this was how he
did it: ‘Don’t ever... come back... here... again.’
And I was like, ‘his motherfucker is taking so
long to say this line.’ Like, ‘How is he stretching
this out as long as he is?’ He fucking stole the
scene, man. He killed it. He was wonderful.”
Del Toro’s first movie was Big Top Pee Wee.
He played Duke, the Dog-Faced Boy. In 1989,
at 21, he was a vicious Colombian henchman,
with boyband bone structure, in Licence to
Kill, Timothy Dalton’s second — and final —
Bond film. hat was his best gig to that point,
16 weeks in Acapulco and Mexico Ciy. He was
paid a then unimaginable sum: “Fory grand!
Crazy!” He bought himself a suitcase. “I wanted
to travel in syle, yessir.”
He was in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner.
He had parts in Fearless, with Jef Bridges, and
Swimming with Sharks, with Kevin Spacey. But
his breakthrough came in 1995, with he Usual
Suspects, that taut, knoty neo-noir that assem-
bled a magnificent parade of character actorsand proceeded to pick the audience’s collective
pocket in some syle.
In a red silk shirt open to the navel, under
a black tux, Del Toro’s Fred Fenster is a career
criminal who seems to be keeping time to his
own private shule beat. He pimp-struts and
jive-talks and has the coolest speech impedi-
ment since Brando shoved a coton wool ball
behind his botom lip for Don Corleone. With
his shaved eyebrows and his pale skin and his
shocking black hair he looks like a Latin mati-
nee idol of the silent era. He has the body lan-
guage of a stroke victim. He sounds almost
Japanese, certainly not as if English were his
first or even second language. “He’ll flip you,”
he slurs. “Flip you for real.”
None of this was in the script. But the
director and the writer and the other actors
encouraged him to trust his instincts.
“I went out on a limb,” he says. “I’d been
doing stuf like that in acting class. But not in
the movies. I think I was more into being liked
by the producer. I’d been too social, and maybe
not concentrating on my job. Suddenly it was
like, ‘Hey, maybe this guy can act!’”he would watch with his older cousins, using
their home projector. But no one in the fam-
ily had ever been a professional performer, or
earned a living from the arts.
After he graduated from high school, Del
Toro had no clue what to do next. “I was a litle
bit freaking out. My basketball career had not
really... it didn’t click. I wanted to go into paint-
ing. I took painting classes, but...”
He was accepted at the University of
California San Diego. Lacking any particular
idea of what to study, he majored in business.
Unknown to him, UCSD had a drama pro-
gramme that was among the best in the coun-
try. He signed up, almost on a whim. “What
confused me was it was so much fun. I thought
that if you want to do something for real, it
should be hard.”
Somehow, acting made sense to him. He felt
he understood it. “Like there was a logic to it.
I realised this was maybe something I should
do.” Ater a year, he decided to leave San Diego:
“I was cocy.” He would go to New York, cru-
cible of American theatre acting, and make it
there. He lasted five months.
“It was too hard, I couldn’t do it, I threw [in]
the towel.” Momentarily defeated, he agreed to
return to college. On the way he stopped of in
LA, to see his brother, who was studying med-
icine at UCLA. While he was there he met an
agent, who put him forward for an audition
at the famous Stella Adler Academy of Acting
and heatre. On the spot, he was ofered a full
scholarship.
He trained with Adler herself, the woman
who had discovered Brando, among other
fairly unbeatable claims to immortaliy. “here
was a sense of a laboratory,” he says. “I took it
serious. I was doing it for me.”
He lived in a litle place with no kitchen, in
Santa Monica, near the ocean, and not too far
from Gustavo. His first professional roles were
small parts in TV shows. Work came in fits
and starts. Whenever he was close to despair,
something would arrive to keep him going:
“For every part I got, there were probably 300
I failed at.”
You can spot him siting on the bonnet of
a car, catching Madonna’s eye in the video for
“La Isla Bonita”. He was in an episode of Miami
Vice. There was a show called Drug Wars: the
Camarena Story. Josh Brolin remembers work-
ing with him on an episode of another show,
Private Eye, in 1987, when they were both still
in their teens. Brolin was one of the show’s
stars, Del Toro a guest player.
“He was really skinny, had a big tuft of
hair on his head that went straight out, like
Eraserhead,” Brolin says. “I remember a scene
that was just he and I. My car had been sto-
len and then given back. he car was black, it
was a ’49 Merc, and when it came back it was‘I got really luc with my godmother. She was
the one who said: “Go big.”’ He drops his voice to
an impassioned whisper: “‘Why not go big?”’