- Benicio del Toro
- Spanish culture
- Destinations
When Puerto Rican born and raised Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez first announced to his father and siblings that he intended to pursue a career in acting, they didn't take the news very well. As Del Toro once told an interviewer, "My family freaked when I told them I wanted to be an actor. It was like telling them I wanted to be an astronaut. On top of that, it was like saying that in order to be an astronaut, I was going to have to drive a cab in New York for five years.”
The family, who wanted Benicio to follow in on the family’s footsteps and become a lawyer, probably had their worst fears realized when Benicio won his first movie role, playing "Duke the Dog-Faced Boy," in the ill-contrived sequel to Pee-Wee´s Big Adventure, Big Top Pee-Wee. Undaunted by the abominable effort, Del Toro stuck it out, and over the course of the next several years, he paid the bills with a steady stream of supporting roles, both in films and on television, including several memorable portrayals of drug-dealing heavies.
His career caught fire with the role of enunciation-challenged con man Fred Fenster in Bryan Singer's stunning ensemble crime drama The Usual Suspects (1995), a performance for which he won an Independent Spirit award for Best Supporting Actor. He won the same award the following year for his work in the critically lauded biopic Basquiat, the first commercial feature film about a painter made by a painter. With a résumé comprised in equal measures of mainstream movies and independent projects, Del Toro is uniquely positioned to become a hit both at the box office and on the film-festival circuit.
Now living in Los Angeles, Del Toro maintains a low profile between movies, and has managed to avoid becoming entangled in any celebrity romances. His screenwriting and directing debut in the short film Submission, which starred an unknown Matthew McConaughey, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1995. The fledgling filmmaker would like to direct again at some point, but has said of himself, "I get quite embarrassed with my acting when I see it on the screen. I would imagine with a film that's my own, I'd be really embarrassed and have to leave the country." While he may not get behind the camera again anytime soon, he's spent plenty of time in front of it: 1998 brought a role as lawyer and confidante Oscar Acosta in the Terry Gilliam-directed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and Del Toro had a phenomenal year in 2000, with his Golden Globe and Oscar-winning supporting performance in Steven Soderbergh's drug war-focused drama Traffic (whose character speaks predominantly in Spanish), and his co-starring turn in Guy Ritchie's well-received crime caper Snatch.
In 2008, Benicio del Toro became the first Puerto Rican actor to receive the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his personification of Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the historical 2-part epics filmed in Spanish The Argentine and the sequel Guerrilla (together known as Che). Benicio staked the last couple years of his life on the project, and the hard work confirms him as one of cinema's greatest men… or as he simply puts it: “I’m simply an actor”. An actor entitled to be amused as the year 2009 has an already hairy Benicio playing an even hairier lead role: that of the man that gets bitten by a wolf in the remake of 1941’s The Wolfman.
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