he could be the new Brando.

As befits an actor labeled the new Brando, Benicio Del Toro is a nerve-inducing mix of insecurity and arrogance, shyness and spontaneity. For someone who uses the words "stuff", "like" and "you know" with the frequency of a teenage girl, he is extensively educated in everything from James Joyce to the history of radical politics. He is both polite - a natural born door-holder - and rude. Eager to order his lunch, the 31-year-old whistles for the waitress. "You can't whistle for a waitress," I hear myself shriek, my voice terribly shriff and British. "That's horrible."

"What? No." he mumbles, a Puerto Rican accent still discernible. "I was just whistling for my dog. I think it's over there." I look around for it. There is no dog.

Fumbling for something to say to him, I am about to exclaim, "Wow, you're tall!" until I remember that very popular poster for The Usual Suspects - his most famous film - a police line-up shot that clearly shows Del Toro to be over six foot. And he has that tall man's burden where he seems uncomfortable in his own skin, spiritually and physically, as if it has shrunk in the wash.

He is wearing green tracksuit trousers with a heavy denim jacket buttoned all the way to the top, despite the 80-degree heat. During our lunch, he runs his hands through his thick, gray-flecked hair. Since his debut as an 18-year-old in the James Bond film License To Kill, and throughout the baseball thriller The Fan, The Usual Suspects, the art biopic Basquiat, the black comedy Excess Baggage and the gangster flick The Funeral, there is one ongoing theme: no matter how many scenes Benicio Del Toro steals, he has never been able to control his hair.

The physical unease is also a hangover from the 40lb of weight he put on for his starring role as the drug-crazed Doctor Gonzo (to Johnny Depp's Raoul Duke, a.k.a. Hunter S. Thompson) in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He managed it in nine weeks, eating "chairs, tables, buildings and bridges. But what really pushed the balance was doughnuts."

Did being so conscious of his weight give him an insight into the insecurities women feel daily? Did it make him feel like a girl? Del Toro snorts into his soup. "I always feel like a girl," he says, then he focuses and answers seriously, "When I was that heavy, it gave me a sense of space and gravity. I paid attention to gravity. Getting out of bed needed one percent more effort and my lower back hurt. And, when you gain weight, people don't look at you in the same way."

He clearly isn't used to not being admired, for in his normal state, Del Toro looks like Che Guevara. This is helpful, since he is set to play him in his next film - "if they can get the script exactly right". Del Toro has the closest to yellow eyes I've ever seen and like Che, whose nickname was El Chino, there is an oriental slant to them. Nevertheless, he is reticent about being photographed. Still, photos don't seem to capture the essence of Del Toro, because the most attractive thing about him, on film and in life, is that his features are always moving. He is constantly screwing up his nose, rolling his eyeballs and pushing his chin into his neck in imperious disdain. Hunter S. Thompson told him that no matter what he does, he always looks guilty.

Del Toro, who had not read for Fear and Loathing before he was cast, was impressed by Hunter, seeing his hovel not as a tale of drug-crazed nihilists, but of revolutionaries. ("Listen, the Establishment killed these people's leaders - JFK, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King had all been murdered. And we're still dealing with that…") Training with the New York theater legend, Stella Adler, he was taught that "a junkie uses his own body to tell society there's something wrong".

Contrary to rumor, neither he nor Depp took the method route when it came to all the drugs they were supposed to have consumed. "In the book, Hunter really exaggerated about the amount of drugs. Anyone who took that much would be dead. An elephant would be dead. So use your own imagination. You invent your own drugs. The "'ether walk', for instance, I stole from my 18-month-old-goddaughter."

While Gilliam's film has been warily received, Del Toro has garnered nothing but plaudits. His performance is a tour de force of near-operatic intensity. By the time he got to the bathtub scene - in which he's on ether, alcohol, cocaine and marijuana - "I could have recited the Bible. Which I actually did in an out-take."

I ask him if anything else he did was cut. He screws his nose up: "Between you and me? Tons. It's done. It's the director's movie. But there's stuff that I did that is not in that film. For a while I was like…" He makes a noise of air escaping from a pierced lung, then puts it into words.

"I wrote a note to Hunter saying, 'I gave your movie my ass-soul.' "

Benicio Del Toro was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His mother - who had been ill for a long time - died of hepatitis when he was nine. One of his fondest memories is of her taking him to see Papillon, which remains one of his favorite films. His father relocated the family to Pennsylvania. He was a strict disciplinarian, in the old-fashioned corporal sense, but Del Toro seems to idolize him.

"When my father was a boy, he was bitten by a dog. My grandfather went out and hanged the dog. When I was a kid, I was thrown by a horse. My father punched the horse, right in the face."

Beyond that, he will not talk much about his personal life, just one of many factors contributing to the New Brando analogy. Like Brando, he mumbles stubbornly. His acting, being somewhat mannered, is not to everyone's taste. He is hugely admired by other actors such as Matt Damon. He has a tendency to get a little heavy and looks like he could get seriously fat in old age. He has a reputation for being a loner. There are rumors of a tiny book-filled apartment where he locks himself away for days.

However, he is hugely popular with the opposite sex. Among the women who swoon when I mention him are several movie stars, a high-powered newspaper editor and an eminent feminist. The Oscar-nominated actress Minnie Driver shares the same manager as Del Toro (he also represents Leonardo DiCaprio). Recalling the few times they dated, she laughs, "I felt honored. Because you get the sense of him being enormously private, it's a privilege when he opens up and lets you in. He only has to open up the tiniest bit and it goes a long way. It's like a red rag to a girl."

I mention to Alicia Silverstone that Del Toro can look like an angel or a devil, often in the same scene. "Yes," whispers the actress whose romance with her co-star during the filming of Excess Baggage was hardly an industry secret. "That can be confusing."

Although the film was critically derided, Del Toro still got excellent reviews. It was Alicia Silverstone's debut as producer and the industry had doomed her to failure before shooting began. He speaks fondly of her: "People did not like the fact that a young girl had so much power. But the truth was, there was a big problem with the director, and Alicia really had to take control. She helmed that movie."

He himself has written and directed his own short film "about a drug dealer in a hotel room, with these two DA's pretending to buy drugs from him". The public will never see it. "It was never intended to be shown in public. A friend of mine had a camera and I had written something. I called a few friends, they were there the next day and we shot it in two days." His writing is ongoing. After our lunch, he will go home to record "thoughts collected during the day, things people have said."

Actors are, to some degree, inherently dull and one gets the impression of Del Toro being a fascinating man trapped in the body of an actor. He would be even more interesting if he were a professor or a lawyer (as his parents wanted him to be). Maybe he knows it, and that's why he goes off to do his writing that no one else will ever see, to restore his dignity.

So why would a smart guy like him want to be an actor?

"Hmm," he ponders, rolling his eyeballs. "Because I want attention," he leans in close, "and it might come from a seed of revenge. Or pure anger."

Does it? I breathe.

He pulls back, "Could be."

And that's it. He leaves the rest to the screen.

Juan Primo, in The Fan, is the role that best sums up why he is so special. In casting him as the swaggering, illiterate, beery Puerto Rican baseball star, the studio executives put a crude culturally specific mantle on him. In more than two or three scenes, he throws it off gracefully, emerging as an unbelievably sexual and erudite provocateur. His acting is a "Go to hell!" to Hollywood, yet it's so subtle that he subverts even the most mainstream film. Put him in a work of art such as Basquiat or The Usual Suspects, when there is no pre-ordained judgement, and he tears up the screen.

Out in the sun, helping me wait for my cab, he leans his foot on the wheel of as shiny new car. The elderly owner is not best pleased: "your shoe is getting dirt on my tire," she says. "Hmm," shrugs Del Toro, pleasantly. "Maybe your tire is getting dirt on my shoe."

"Is that my cab?" I wonder, as a car drives off in the opposite direction, a passenger in the back seat. "Yeah," deadpans Del Toro, "that's your cab and that's you in the back and you're driving over there in a parallel universe."

The cab arrives just as I note the cigarette burn on his wrist. Caught off-guard and without a joke, he admits that under the denim jacket there are 11 more. "Was that for film or for life?"

He pulls his chin into his neck and screws up his nose. "It was for Fear and Loathing."

It's a dual answer and, if you care to read it that way, the most truthful statement he has given all day.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is released on November 13.

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