EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW for PORT ISSUE 17
Interview by Courtney Rubin, shot by Cedric Buchet
Few actors bridge complex creative integrity and superstar box office appeal like Benicio Del Toro – PORT meets Hollywood’s most interesting bad boy
There’s not a lot Benicio Del Toro wants you to know about him. Not even seemingly innocuous things, like where he keeps his Oscar or what kind of doughnuts he ate to pile on 40 pounds for 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (16 a day, it transpires). He balks at even revealing the names of his two tortoises and two dogs, as if, like indigenous tribes with photography, he fears that doing so would rob the animals of their souls. (“You’re going to tell the world?” he says in disbelief. “That’s what sells?” He shakes his head and sounds resigned at the prospect of a tortoise disclosure. “That’s what sells…”).
When I meet Del Toro one bright summer afternoon in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel in New York City’s Tribeca neighbourhood, the first thing he says is, “I’ll try to be candid,” and laughs knowingly. All too knowingly, because he may well be one of the most puzzling, private, enduringly enigmatic figures in Hollywood.
Del Toro, 48, has day-old stubble and hair so thick and striking it’s even inspired an online forum (‘The World of Benicio Del Toro’s Hair!!!’). He is wearing jeans, a Bob Marley t-shirt, a black leather jacket and black Adidas trainers. The dark circles under his eyes that always make him look so, well, dark, are in full midnight mode. But I rarely see them because – except when he’s doing deft imitations of, say, director Bryan Singer or his tortoise – he looks around constantly, craning his neck to peer at the sky.
He mumbles with only marginally better enunciation than his breakout character Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects, the 1995 Singer film in which Del Toro first made his name, and rarely finishes a sentence. He speaks in ellipses and enthusiastic sound effects (“aah ah da da da da” and “a da di di da”), and he’ll sit in silence for as long as you will, which would seem sullen and uncooperative if he weren’t so unfailingly polite and quick to laugh at himself. Approximately every two minutes he puts his hands over the sides of his chair, as if he’s about to bolt. Except he doesn’t. Because, it turns out, there is one thing he wants to share – the lone piece of information in two hours that doesn’t have to be winched out of him: “You know, I took a painting class in high school. I really enjoyed it.”
Is this the secret of Benicio Del Toro – that he likes painting? Sounds movie star-banal, until it becomes clear that his reluctance to give himself away has much to do with his ideas about art, specifically the art of acting. He informs me I can make up the whole interview if I want, or at least the details he doesn’t want to supply – in the same way that he will give life to a character. “The actor makes an interpretation of what the writer wrote, and that’s key for me,” he says. “You become kind of like… the psychoanalyst of the character. You can express yourself; you can put your personal stuff there, your knowledge of something, and explore it. It brings you back in a way to Jean-Michel Basquiat” (the versatile 1990s celebrity-artist who is one of Del Toro’s painting heroes).
Right: Moore cotton twill blouson BELSTAFF
His other secret: Benicio Del Toro, on-screen thug and villain, and off-screen the guy who may or may not have had sex with a certain starlet in a lift after an awards show, still hopes that at some point we’ll see him as a romantic lead. “I’d like to do more of that,” he says. Ironically, Del Toro has been linked romantically to such beauties as Scarlett Johansson, Lindsay Lohan, Sophie Dahl and Catherine Keener. So even as he yearns to play a romantic lead on film, he is very much one in reality.
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