Del Toro works hard at playing make-believe
USA Today
By Claudia Puig
January 23, 2001
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Filmmakers attest to his dogged pursuit of truth and accuracy.
"He's just so passionate and committed," says Traffic director Steven Soderbergh. "It's not that he's a perfectionist. I don't think he cares that it's perfect. He just wants it to be true. It's about honesty. I totally respect that kind of dedication."
Del Toro is not entirely comfortable with the kudos heaped upon him.
"It was just a matter of being believable," he says with characteristic understatement. "I did a little research."
That research included spending time with DEA agents and becoming impassioned on the issue of the drug trade.
"I was working with Steven really tight," says the actor. "He allowed me to challenge . He provided me with the babysitting I needed. We would meet every weekend for about three hours or after finishing a week of work and talk about what we did, what we were going to do. Sometimes we'd just talk about basketball."
Not all directors are born to nurture actors or take as kindly to Del Toro's meticulous devotion.
"It can get you into a lot of trouble," he says. "The writer might see it as someone challenging his writing. But I never do it for my own personal reasons. I'm getting better at seeing that sometimes I might get stuck on something, but it might not be that important. You have to decide what the big battles are in order to win the war."
Guy Ritchie, who directed Del Toro in Snatch, noticed the actor's commitment to the finer points. "He's a pleasure to direct. Benny's also a funny lad."
The director confesses that Del Toro wasn't too keen with the way he was taking a fall after being slugged by one of his captors — mainly because Del Toro wanted it to be dead-on. "Every time you see him hit, it was probably the 50th take we had," Ritchie says. "He takes it all very seriously, but he's a good boy."
These days Del Toro has made the transition from a respected character actor to a bona fide star. At a trendy eatery, the striking 6-foot-4 actor is easily spotted despite a baseball cap pulled low, shading his distinctive eyes and covering his dark, wavy hair topped by a thatch of gray.
"That was your movie, man," gushes a fan about Traffic. "You did a great job."
After a second well-wisher makes his way over, a sheepish Del Toro quips: "I paid them. But I said to be here at 5:30, and they showed up at 6:30. They're late.
"You get recognized when your movie's out," he shrugs. "I get recognized, for the most part, for the right reasons. For the work. Not because someone saw my picture at the post office."
Before Traffic, audiences might have expected to see Del Toro's mug on the post office wall, so convincing was he as a small-time thug with a nearly incomprehensible mumble in The Usual Suspects.
Then, he pulled a Robert De Niro and packed on the pounds to play Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
"If I'm going to play someone, I'll play it to the bone," he says. "When I was doing Traffic, I cared about that guy."
Most of Del Toro's part is in Spanish, with subtitles. Though Del Toro speaks Spanish fluently, he has a Puerto Rican accent, and the character he played was from Tijuana, with its own distinctive cadence.
His commitment to making his character believable extended to working closely with a dialect coach in order to say his lines with Mexican inflections.
"I worked hard on that accent," Del Toro says. "It was as hard as any accent I've done. It's like an American doing an Australian accent or a German accent. I speak Spanish, but my Spanish is in and out. If we went out after shooting and I had to survive, I might stumble here and there.
"Especially when I talk about film. It's very hard for me to talk about film in Spanish, because I left Puerto Rico when I was 12, and everything I know about film I learned in English."
Del Toro moved with his family to Pennsylvania, later attending college in San Diego, studying drama there and in New York with famed acting coach Stella Adler.
He comes from a family of lawyers, so for a while Del Toro was regarded as a black sheep for choosing acting.
"They thought, 'He's just going through a phase,' " he says. "Now my dad is hooked to the computer, looking to see what they say about me. They're very proud.
"I never thought about becoming a lawyer, but I knew I had to become someone," he says. "Actually, becoming someone is not the thing. It's to find something I really liked. And I got lucky. I fell in love with what I do, and when you do that, nothing else matters. Rain, shine, you're OK."
Then he lowers his voice, his hazel eyes penetrating, and leans closer, as if about to communicate a closely guarded secret.
"Everybody has the same dream, you know," he whispers. "The American dream is a global dream. The pursuit of happiness, freedom, whatever."
(Photograph by Dan MacMedan/USA Today)