Benicio Del Toro Defends the Gonzo Golden Rules

"Cannes is like Las Vegas," smirks Benicio Del Toro. "The first day you win, the second day you lose, and the third day they run you out of town." Del Toro, who plays Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas's raving Dr. Gonzo, had just returned from France after the movie's extremely cool reception. Dr. Gonzo's careening swagger in Fear and Loathing is perhaps the darkly comic character actor's maniacal pinnacle; he's grotesquely charming as the bull-in-a- china-shop foil to Johnny Depp's Raoul Duke. Del Toro is the kind of chameleon-like performer who seems to sneak up sideways on the viewer--his roles in The Usual Suspects, The Fan, and Basquiat are studies in coiled intensity. But to play the deranged Dr. Gonzo (Based on Hunter Thompson's right-hand man, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta), he gained 48 pounds in nine weeks eating "chairs, tables, buildings, and bridges. But what really tipped the balance was doughnuts."

Born and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico--a suburb of San Juan that "likes to think of itself as the Manhattan of the Caribbean"--the strapping Del Toro, 31, is the son of a country lawyer who shipped him to boarding school in Pennsylvania when he got into teenage trouble. He then went to UC San Diego, where he split his time between painting and acting classes.

Like Acosta, who in real life was a Chicago activist lawyer, Del Toro feels ambivalent about his Latin identity. "He was stuck between two worlds," the actor says. "I can go there in a second." Thompson recognized the wild streak Del Toro shared with Acosta. "We were doing the fantasy sequence where we're in jail and Harry Dean Stanton sentences us to 'castration, double castration!' Hunter comes up to me and says, 'You know what your problem is?' And I said, 'What?'. 'Your face!' And I said, 'What's the matter with my face?' And he said, 'No matter what you do, you always look guilty!'"

When I ask Del Toro if he knows that Acosta once sued Thompson for stealing the idea of gonzo journalism, he is philosophical. "Everybody steals from everybody else. I stole the idea for the 'ether walk' from my 16-month old goddaughter, Isabel."

Del Toro's only foray into Hollywood romantic-lead territory yielded last year's Excess Baggage. "I tried it, to see how it felt to do one of those things, and I'm proud of a few scenes in that movie, and the essence of my character, but I suffer too much when I see it." The actor is currently talking to Spike Lee about playing an Italian hairdresser in his next effort, Summer of Sam, about the effect that serial killer David Berkowitz had on a Bronx neighborhood in 1977. After that, he hopes to work with his friend Julian Schnabel on his adaptation of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arena's memoir, Before Night Falls. "Julian calls me up and says, 'I got this part--it could be you, Banderas, or Al Pacino.' And I said, 'F*** you, if you want me, you call me and tell me you want me. I don't want to audition against those guys.'"

Visions of Brando-esque eccentricity can pop into your head while watching Del Toro, onscreen and off, but he shies away from such talk when writers bring it up. "I'm always afraid about the comparison to Mr. M.B. He's the Picasso of acting." But he invoked Brando's (and his own) teacher Stella Adler when responding to criticism of Fear and Loathing as a pro-drug film. "Stella was telling me how to play a junkie," he remembers. "She was saying he's a man who uses his body as a billboard to tell society that there's something wrong."

"People are going to criticize this film, but all I have to say is 'F*** 'em.' We just did a classic piece. Read the book. Are we sending a message like 'Do drugs, it's cool'? When you do Romeo and Juliet, are you saying that it's okay to fall in love and kill yourself by drinking poison?"

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(Photographs By Robin Holland)

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