An Anti-Star Is Born

Actor Benicio Del Toro gets down and dirty

in The Way of The Gun
The New York Daily News
By Sean Mitchell
Sunday, September 3, 2000

LOS ANGELES The first review Benicio Del Toro ever got came from a college acting teacher who told him he did very well as a dead man.

It proved prophetic. The 6-foot-4 Puerto Rican-born actor went on to distinguish himself in such movies as "The Usual Suspects" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" as a man who said a lot even though his lips barely moved. He mumbled. He had an impassive stare. And yet he was undeniably vivid.

Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Del Toro in "The Way of the Gun," said of him, "I always assumed he was the bastard brother of Brad Pitt."

Actor Chris Penn has, meanwhile, dubbed him "the Puerto Rican James Dean."

In McQuarrie's movie, which opens Friday, Del Toro, 33, broods, sulks and smolders with an unmistakable incandescence. His performance could make him a star, although the film itself — dark and extremely violent — probably will not help.

Del Toro plays a ruthless modern-day outlaw who, with his partner (Ryan Phillippe), kidnaps a nine-months-pregnant surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) and drives her to Mexico to await a $15 million ransom from the wealthy mobster who paid the mercenary mom to have his baby.

"They're not good people but they do have some sort of code," Del Toro said of his and Phillippe's characters at a coffee shop around the corner from his apartment building near UCLA. "They're bad guys who have a limit." Technically, anyway.

He and McQuarrie have been friends since they worked together on "The Usual Suspects," the screenplay of which brought McQuarrie an Oscar.

They collaborated on the idea for "The Way of the Gun," their intention being to tweak the William Goldman-scripted "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) by realistically updating it.

"Well, that was the idea," said Del Toro. "That movie was cute and funny. A few people get killed in it, but it doesn't show you that a bullet hurts. I've done some movies like that, and at this point in my life I'm more interested in a film that deals with guns in a serious way.

"I think people who are against guns should like 'The Way of the Gun,' but they will hate it..

The connection to "Butch Cassidy" is underscored by the names of the two outlaws in the film: Del Toro plays "Longbaugh" and Phillippe is "Parker," the real last names of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

"What 'Butch Cassidy' never showed you," said McQuarrie, "was who they really were and the consequences of their actions. I wanted to take their real names and use them as aliases in order to show you who they really were instead of romanticizing them. They were sociopaths."

In both films, they're also handsome sociopaths, which is why we can like them against our better instincts. Del Toro himself, though, doesn't seem comfortable with the idea of people liking him for his looks. Walking through Westwood, he wears a cheap nylon golf cap pulled down over his head in a decidedly anti-fashion statement. He may be that rare thing in Hollywood, an anti-star.

"More than any other actor I've ever met, Benicio is not in pursuit of fame or recognition," said McQuarrie. "I think he's a guy who has a great disdain for popularity. He's very resistant to playing a leading man. He would rather create a character.

And in so doing, Del Toro is well known for obsessing about the little things. "I like what I'm doing, playing small notes, staying right there," he said in the plain-spoken tone that he levels at the world with a light Hispanic accent.

RUINING THE WESTERN

"Benicio wanted to live like that guy, to become that guy during the shoot," said co-star James Caan, who plays a bagman sent to make a deal with Longbaugh. "I think he stopped bathing because that would have been right for the character. He's nuts. He's good but he's nuts."

Del Toro cared enough about making the gunplay in the film seem real that he hired his own weapons expert, a SWAT team leader from the Los Angeles Police Department, to advise him on the handling of firearms.

"I wanted to get to know these guns because I don't know anything about them," he said. "You have to learn how to hold it right, to respect it. And keep your finger off the trigger."

One thing he learned ruins the memory of many a Hollywood Western: "Anytime you see in a movie a guy with two guns drawn going into a place, ba-ba-ba-ba, boom-boom-boom, he won't hit anything. It's been proven. There was a moment where I was supposed to do that, and I refused. Because, you know, I get into the truth of it."

There's a climactic scene in "The Way of the Gun" when Longbaugh goes to pick up the ransom. It's in three large duffel bags.

"He asked me, 'How much does $15 million weigh?' McQuarrie recalled. "I hadn't given it any thought, but we researched it in different denominations. In $10s and $20s it would weigh 2,000 pounds. In $100s, it would weigh 375 pounds, so that's how we came up with the three duffel bags, 125 pounds each. I rewrote the scene based on Benicio's attention to detail. Short of Hemingway, I would say, no one works harder to get at the truth."

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