Esquire — June 2018 135Capital Pictures
was on his way. In the years after The Usual
Suspects, he won awards for his performance
as Benny Dalmau, friend of Basquiat, in Julian
Schnabel’s biopic of the artist. He was a base-
ball star opposite Robert De Niro in he Fan.
He even made a romcom, Excess Baggage, with
Alicia Silverstone.
Then he was fat and freaky as Johnny
Depp’s drug-addled attorney, Dr Gonzo, in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam’scourageous adaptation of Hunter S hompson’s
countercultural classic. It was a performance of
ferocious commitment and intensiy — he was
stubbing out cigaretes on his arm, for scenes
that didn’t even make the cut — and it nearly
derailed his career. Rumours swirled around
him: he was crazy, he was difficult, he was
on drugs. “I’m very proud of that movie, but it
tanked. And my man, it was like, exile on main
street again.”
Cameos followed in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch
and later in Sean Penn’s drama, he Pledge, with
Jack Nicholson. But Traic, in 2000, is the film
that made him. It might be the film for which
he will be longest remembered. He was Javier
Rodriguez Rodriguez, a Mexican cop in aviator
shades and suede boots, playing all the angles:
the army, the cartels, the Americans. It’s a tre-
mendously rounded and compelling perfor-
mance. here’s a fleshiness to him, a sensualiy
and a wolfish charm.
Traffic set him up for much of the good
work to come. As a born-again ex-con trau-
matised by a terrible accident in the harrow-
ing 21 Grams, directed by Alejandro González
Iñárritu. As the psychopathic Jackie Boy in
Sin Ciy. As a junkie who begins a relationship
with his best friend’s widow, played by Halle
Berry, in hings We Lost in the Fire.
In 2008, he won Best Actor at Cannes for
his performance in Steven Soderbergh’s doged
two-part epic, Che. Rather than the sainted rev-
olutionary icon familiar from the thrift shop
T-shirts, his Ernesto Guevara is soldier, doctor,
pipe smoker, asthmatic, unbending guerrilla
leader. It’s a performance of great control: never
showy, never grabby, relentless, sombre, cussed.
hat makes it all sound terribly worthy, but
Del Toro is an entertainer as well as an artist.
He pops up in cameos in the films of populist
provocateurs (as a coke-snorting cartel enforcer
in Oliver Stone’s Savages), and critical darlings
(Paul Thomas Anderson’s groovy Inherent
Vice) and in commercial jugernauts (he’s he
Collector in two Marvel films). Last year, he
made a characteristically iconoclastic appear-
ance in Star Wars: the Last Jedi, as the duplic-
itous DJ. It’s a tremendously sly performance,
with echoes of earlier eccentricities.
His buddy Brolin enjoyed that one. “Oh,
I was the guy laughing my ass off when he
came on screen, because I know the stories of
how people reacted to him on set. He wasn’t
doing it for efect, but the new generation [of
actors] will look at you and go: ‘You wanna do
what? Why?’ Now all you have to do is walk
from A to B and say your line. It’s like, when
was that ever the case in Bennie’s head? Walk
from A to B and just say a line? It just doesn’t
exist. He’s just not put together that way. He
fills a moment. hat’s what you’re constantly
trying to do: fill a moment without looking likeyou’re trying too hard. hat skill to be able to
do that, that’s the diference...”
Del Toro has put together an impressive
body of work, then, and earned the respect
of his peers. Still, he says, it has not always
been easy.
“It was always hard to find work,” he
says. “It still is. It’s hard to find good mate-
rial... I mean I could work, but you make your
choices. If I was a writer or a painter it would
be diferent, but you don’t make movies alone.
As an actor, you’re at the mercy of so many
things. If you have a point of view, or taste,
you’re gonna be picy. You have to wait.”“this freaking thing with the finger,” is
how Del Toro describes a trick he pulls with
a handgun in Sicario 2: Soldado. his is a scene
in which his character executes a narco-traf-
ficker on a ciy street by rapid-firing his pistol,
held in his right hand, with the index finger of
his let. You can see him do it on YouTube, in
the trailer for the film.
Did he invent this trick himself? He is
almost ofended by this: he doesn’t magic stuf
out of nowhere. Everything he does comes
from observation of real life.
“I saw someone do it, a long time ago. I was
like 25. Someone right next to me did it, at
a shooting range. I went, ‘hat motherfucker!’
We talked about it. Because you couldn’t hit
anything doing it like that. When you see a guy
with two guns in a movie, he’s not gonna hit
anything. Real people that know about guns
don’t do that. But at close range, what I do in
the movie, you can use it. When I saw it I was
like, ‘Oh, it’s a trick for the circus. It’s not to be
used.’ But if you’re close, you’re gonna put a lot
of holes in someone.”
It looks dangerous. And also, dare I say it,
kind of cool? “It’s cool,” he nods.
Does he worry about that? “Of course
I worry about it! What the fuck am I gonna tell
you? I do worry about it. It might be enticing
for kids who have a gun, to do that.”
Crime has always been meat and drink to
Hollywood. Drama is conflict: crime supplies
it. Sex, death, violence, money, power, greed,
lust, revenge, love and hate, good and evil.
Each era has its own crime genres, reflecting
the times, exploiting the contemporary bogey-
men for cheap thrills, in some cases, and more
nuanced explorations of flawed human nature
in others.
In the hirties, during Prohibition, it was
the gangster picture. Stars like James Cagney
and Edward G Robinson. In the Forties, the
Hollywood noir: Bogart’s crumpled gum-
shoes and their femmes fatales. In the Fities,
America atempted to work through its bloody
history with the Western. Del Toro is the‘I was the guy laughing my ass of when
he came on screen,’ says his friend
Josh Brolin of Del Toro’s performance
as the codebreaker DJ in Star Wars:
he Last Jedi (2017)