134 Esquire — June 2018
During production, he briefly lost his nerve.
“I thought it was completely ridiculous. The
voice was in my head: ‘You’re an idiot, you’re
a clown.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it, I will not do it.’ And
I went out there and I started saying the lines
without any of it. And it was terrible. As an
actor you don’t know when you’re really good
— but you know when you’re bad. I just had to
do it because there was nothing else to do.
“On the last day when I finished, I went into
kind of a baby depression. I go, ‘I’ve made a fool
of myself. his is going to be stupid. What the
hell am I gonna do?’”
But he Usual Suspects was a hit. “I learned
something there. When you make a choice
and you commit to it, there’s no point sec-
ond-guessing it. No one knew it was gonna
work. But it worked. Had it not, it would have
been, ‘Look at that kid, making faces.’”
Now he was playing with the big boys,and being measured against them: “John
Malkovich, Mickey Rourke, Andy Garcia,
Willem Dafoe, Sean Penn, Daniel Day-Lewis,
Gary Oldman: those guys, when their mov-
ies came out, you went to see them. Now I was
knocking on the door of that club. And stand-
ing on my head to get in.”
There would be advances and retreats
to come, even times when he thought he should
pack it in to do something else, but Del Toro‘It’s hard to find good material. 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 pic. You have to wait’