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RecentlyBenicio Del Toro realized that he is a sprinter.
He is always identified with athletes – rigorous training, whole body commitment, ruthless tugging between ability and dumb luck. As an actor in movies like "The Usual Suspects", "Traffic" and, in a recent galactic detour, "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and a pair of "Avengers" movies, he has been an incredibly economical player, if not always the most valuable, averaging an unusually high ratio of memorable moments to minutes on the screen.
But it is only during a recent test of endurance that Mr. Del Toro understood what kind of athlete had manufactured it. He was shooting "Escape at Dannemora", an eight-part mini-series for Showtime and his first television role in more than two decades. The shoot lasted almost seven months.
"It was a marathon," he recalls from the other side an interview at Sony's Manhattan Tower at the end of last month. "I had to learn to withdraw and breathe, otherwise I would explode."
The lesson can be useful. The Showtime mini-series and "Sicario: the day of the Soldado, "an unlikely sequel to his thriller 2015 semicircular in theaters June 29, inaugurates a new era of longevity for the characters on the screen of Mr. Del Toro, suggesting that his vast career could still find a new craft.
They also mark a more important achievement: Mr. Del Toro, born in Puerto Rico, is today one of the few Latinos to be in the forefront of a film franchise published by Hollywood, where actors Hispanics often have to be content with support pieces, when they exist at all.
At age 51, he is tall and wide with a messy pile of jet-black hair, cheeks and depressed eyelids that remain partially closed, as he kept a loose flame. He has an air of quiet sensibility and a slightly adenoic voice that suggests a version outside the hours of anti-heroes and rogues that he has embodied on camera.
Since his obvious performance in "The Usual Suspects" in 1995, as a minor character named Fenster, which he turned into a mysterious man with a mottled mouth, Mr. Del Toro sprinted his way through the play of & dquo; Together, including "Snatch" "21 Grams" and "Sin City", flamboyant trails that were still bustling long after he delivered his last line.
An Oscar for Best Support for "Traffic" (2000) did not turn it into a fat name overnight, but he went for a kind of leadership status, Halle Berry in "Things we lost in the fire" (2007), and in the biopic Che Guevara "Che" (2008) – a passion project that he also produced.
If audiences are even more likely to recognize Mr. Del Toro as an intriguing side than as a main course, his character in the films "Sicario" is something in between, both the killer of the Spanish title of the film and a near mythical figure who manages to be more feared than seen.
"It represents the rage against the violence of the drug war – the evil of it" Mr. Del Toro said of the character, an inexplicably vengeful soldier of fortune known in films like Alejandro. "He is a victim of the drug cartels, and he has become completely ruthless, like an ice cube."
Few people expected "Sicario" to come back. The original film, which also featured Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin, was a haunting meditation, rated by R, on moral ambiguity and incessant violence on the border between Texas and Mexico. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, he had the mood and rhythm of the art-house ticket and the ticketing start to match, which reported only $ 12 million nationally during its first opening weekend.
But positive reviews, word of mouth and a good international performance ultimately made the film a modest success, with a gross global figure of $ 85 million on a $ 30 million production budget. The author of the film, Taylor Sheridan, introduced the producers Black Label Media and Thunder Road Pictures in a trilogy that would include "Soldado" and a third film "Sicario" (which has not yet been shot in green ).
"We were not talking about a sequel when we were spinning the original," Del Toro said. "But it was one of those things where I thought: why not? Let's go."
"Soldado Day" follows Alejandro and the character of Mr. Brolin, a government bulldog cocksure, on a mission to incite war between rival drug cartels in Mexico. Mr. Del Toro and Mr. Brolin anchor the film – neither Mrs. Blunt nor Mr. Villeneuve have returned – and have been unusually empowered, in collaboration with a new director, Stefano Sollima, to take liberties with Mr. Sheridan's screenplay .
"Taylor is a great writer, but we have certainly begun to tear him apart," Brolin said.
The scenes have been extended or thrown away; secondary intrigues and transitions have been created on the fly, and Mr. Del Toro, as he has done throughout his career, has been busy providing his character with living and imaginative details.
"Benny would come after spending the whole night coming up with five new scenes and all those ideas:" What if we try that? What would happen if we meddled? Remembers Mr. Brolin, who also briefly appeared with Mr. Del Toro in "Avengers: Infinity War." "When he works, he is really in what we do. This is not: "What lines should I learn, and then I will party afterwards."
Mr. Del Toro's innovations have extended to the arches of other characters in history, including the one that helps Alejandro survive while he is at liberty. At the suggestion of Mr. Del Toro, this character was rewritten as a deaf man who communicates in sign language, which leads to an unexpected revelation – also conceived by Mr. Del Toro – about the story of # 39; Alejandro.
In another case, Mr. Del Toro reimagined an early run scene, deciding on a fierce and fast firing style for his character in which an index, facing downward, is repeatedly depressed against the trigger of a pistol.
The result played so well on the camera that it was used in the movie trailer and has become a meme.
"He's always looking for new ways to express the personality of the character" Mr. Sollima said. "You are looking at images after a shoot, and one way or another he has invented this completely different person."
Mr. Brolin argued that while many actors adopt assignments to personify words on a page, few are as persuasive as Mr. Del Toro. "If you are trying to steal scenes, or stand out, you can lose all respect from everyone," said Mr. Brolin, who was a contemporary of Mr. Del Toro in Stella Adler's classes in the 1980s "But with Benny it's the opposite – he's going further and further in a character that he's created, and all you want to do as a spectator, is invest in more and more."
Mr. Del Toro, who lives in Los Angeles and has a 6-year-old daughter with socialite Kimberly Stewart, infuses his character work with fragments of personal history. DJ, the mercenary hacker he played in "The Last Jedi", had a distinctive stutter that Mr. Del Toro said was based on that of his father (fan theories about his greatest symbolism notwithstanding). "We had the habit of imitating him behind his back," said Del Toro, which means he and his brother, Gustavo, now a doctor in Brooklyn.
His father, who still lives in Puerto Rico, was also an indirect source for the "Day of the Soldado" performance scene. Years ago, Mr. Del Toro had the idea of the quick fire method, after seeing someone use it in a shooting range.
"I grew up with guns," he said, remembering he shot at bottle targets with Elder M. Del Toro at his family's farm in Puerto Rico. "My father was in the army and my grandfather was a cop – I had a respect for guns, but also an understanding of their dangerousness."
In his films, Mr. Del Toro often played violent characters who shoot to kill, many of them on one side of the drug war or the other. He is optimistic about his professional reputation: "Humphrey Bogart, Al Pacino and Denzel Washington also played with a lot of bad guys," he said, but regardless of the role that his ethnicity played in his career.
"It's very difficult when your name ends with a '&' and your last name ends with an 'O'," he said. "If you're a Latino actor and you get a job in movies, it's going to be like a gangster."
For Mr. Del Toro, this has sometimes sparked his desire to excel as an actor against a competing impulse to challenge negative stereotypes, a difficult situation for many color actors. Mr. Del Toro said that he decided to focus solely on the quality of writing a character and on the merits of the filmmakers involved.
"If I have to choose between breaking the stereotype and going for the good part, I will always go for the good part," he said. "I just think the good part will always be more satisfying, and I have my own life – I can make sure to break the stereotype there. "
In "Escape at Dannemora", his Showtime miniseries presented later this year, Mr. Del Toro plays a convict who teams up with a classmate, played by Paul Dano, in an improbable attempt steal the coop. (The series, directed by Ben Stiller, is based on The 2015 Prison Break at the Clinton Correctional Center in New York.)
"Dannemora" in part forbade the usual creative process of Mr. Del Toro – as is often the case on TV, the last episodes of the series were still being written, which meant that He gave much of his performance. repeat the experiment, granted a modest warning: "I would like to have a little more … ah, uh … can," he said.
He would like to produce more and even wrote a few things, although he will not tell you what. And, if the right side came to the surface, he said, he would even enjoy the opportunity to leave the guns behind and play upright, salty type of land – a prosecutor, perhaps, a pilot or a firefighter.
In other words, a hero, no "anti" attached, with all the privileges that allows.
"It would not bother me to play someone who will end up having a girl," he says.
Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture journalist covering a range of topics, including film, television and music. Before joining The Times in 2017, he wrote for BuzzFeed and Billboard Magazine.
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