Actor on One Battle After Another, Oscars, Leo

“Meet him at the lobby entrance at 1 p.m. You’ll recognize him :)”

That’s the only instruction.

At 1 p.m., Benicio Del Toro wanders, a little hesitantly, into the Peninsula Beverly Hills. He has no entourage. He’s wearing a black windbreaker, an Oakland A’s cap pulled low over his tousled hair and those famous drowsy eyes. At 6-foot-2, he’s an unmissable presence in this gilded foyer. Then again, it’s Benicio Del Toro. He’d be unmissable in a snowstorm.

He scans the sun-drenched lobby: society ladies in Chanel suits nibbling cucumber sandwiches, a harpist drifting through afternoon tea. Then he veers toward a dim, wood-paneled bar off to the side and slides into a banquette.

“I’ll have a light beer,” I tell the waiter.

Del Toro does not order a beer, leaving my “few small beers” bit — a reference to one of his One Battle After Another character’s most famous lines — dead in the water. He orders a shot of espresso and shoots me a look of mild concern.

“A beer? At one o’clock?” His eyes flick around the room. “How long is this interview, anyway?”

“Do you enjoy doing interviews?” I ask.

“Not really.”

It’s not coming from a place of hostility. Once something is spoken on the record, he explains, it detaches the words from context. Forever. “Sometimes you read it or see it and it’s like, well, that’s not really what I meant at all,” he says. “It shakes you a bit. It becomes … permanent.”

Del Toro is revered by a loose coalition of the most venerated creatives working in Hollywood: Scorsese. DiCaprio. Penn. Anderson (Paul and Wes). Soderbergh. Villeneuve. Despite this outsized reputation, Del Toro resists easy categorization. Collaborators describe his talents as something more akin to a superpower. The force of his presence manages to bend scenes around him — bend entire films, sometimes — all without him raising his voice.

Sean Penn, who stars with Del Toro in One Battle, met Del Toro when he was a dewy-cheeked 20-something newly arrived in Los Angeles from his native Puerto Rico. He remembers immediately wanting to know what was happening “behind the eyes.” Of Del Toro’s expansive imagination, Penn says it operates “in all capitals. You know you’re going to get what you need. But you have no idea what you’re going to get.”

For Del Toro, that unpredictability never announces itself as flamboyance. His performances are rarely loud. His greatest trick is quietly stealing scenes without ever having to chew the furniture.

He broke out at 28 playing a marble-mouthed con man in 1995’s The Usual Suspects. At 59, he’s still captivating audiences with his idiosyncratic human creations. Take Sensei, the part he plays in One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic about militarized oppression, the fight and folly of revolution and the instinct to protect the vulnerable. It’s a low-register role that has placed Del Toro, somewhat to his disbelief, at the center of the awards conversation.

“It’s bizarre,” Del Toro says of the attention that has followed since the Sept. 8 world premiere. The film is nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture and best supporting actor for Del Toro and Penn. The last time Del Toro was nominated for an Oscar was more than two decades ago, for 21 Grams. Three years before that, he took home best supporting actor honors for Traffic.

He insists he entered One Battle with modest expectations. “I’m in the movie for a limited amount of time,” he says. “I came in to get Leo from point A to point D.”

“It’s an honor,” he adds. “It’s huge. But it’s very surprising. There’s something about it that makes me want to not believe it. And I’m trying to enjoy this wave.” He keeps returning to that word: wave. Not campaign, not fray. Wave. Something that lifts you whether you deserve it or not. Something you’d best just give yourself over to.

“What I’ve learned about it is, let it rip. It’s beyond my control. There’s nothing I can do,” he says.

“I think the movie puts a mirror to where we are now,” he says of the response to One Battle, which moves with breakneck speed through a world of desperate migrants, parents, children and a father trying to reunite with his daughter.

“Sensei represents the helper,” he continues. “That human side of all of us. Innocent until proven guilty. You see someone in need, and you help.”

***

In an early draft of One Battle After Another, Sensei participated along with Leo’s character, ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson, in a double murder inside his dojo, setting off a chain reaction of cover-ups and escape. Del Toro balked. Not because of the violence, but because of what he felt was an absence of logic.

“What’s my relationship with Leo until that point in the film?” he remembers scribbling in the margins. “I teach his daughter. I shake his hand. He writes me a check. I deposit the check. That’s it.”

To commit murder on his behalf felt false. “If I kill somebody in my dojo,” he reasoned, “that’s another movie entirely.”

Del Toro’s objection was practical. If you shoot someone in the head in a confined space, there is blood, cleanup and bodies.

“It’s a lot of mess to clean, especially if you shoot someone in the head with a rifle,” he says, almost clinically. “Now we’re going to have to clean it. We’re going to have to clean it fast. We’re going to have to get rid of the corpse.”

The film would instantly become something else: a logistics thriller about evidence disposal. At one point, even the notion of blowing up the dojo using controlled demolition was explored. None of it made sense to Del Toro. More than that, it added up to what he felt was a lesser film.

“Benny planted this idea with me and Leo,” Anderson explains in an email. “It was a very good idea that led to significantly more dramatic possibilities with his character and the overall shape of the film.”

For example, the section set in Baktan Cross, a fictional border town set in the real El Paso, culminates in a raid there. That sequence had long frustrated Anderson.

“It was constantly changing and never found its target. Until Benny suggested the ‘Latino Harriet Tubman situation,’ ” the director says, referring to a pivot that made Sensei the head of an ambitious migrant smuggling operation. “That made everything fall into place.”

Instead of triggering violence, Del Toro suggested Sensei would quietly move families through danger. His character would therefore become a protector rather than an instigator. The dojo, meanwhile, would become a refuge.

“Being in El Paso, at the center of immigration, gave us so much material and local talent to work with,” Anderson says. “It became the centerpiece of the film and certainly the best time I’ve ever had going to work.”

The rewrite recalibrated the center of the film’s moral gravity. Sensei stopped serving as a plot accelerant and started taking on grander thematic relevance. He became, in a quiet and unshowy way, the film’s moral compass.

Del Toro attacks every role that way: script in one hand, a felt-tipped pen in the other. “You’re an interpreter,” he says of his approach to acting. “If you don’t understand the writer, you cannot do it.” Once he understands the story, he starts asking questions — dozens, even hundreds of them. What happens next? Where did the suitcase go? Why is he angry?

Anderson says he wrote the role of Sensei for Del Toro, who had worked with the director on 2014’s Inherent Vice. When scheduling conflicts arose for One Battle, Anderson delayed production three months to accommodate Del Toro’s availability. “I have never done this before,” Anderson says. “But this was a very good use of our budget. The question I had at the time was, ‘How can we not wait for Benicio?’ There simply wasn’t any world where I made the film without him.”

***

Del Toro arrived fresh off the Berlin set of The Phoenician Scheme with 10 days between projects. He attended his daughter’s sixth-grade graduation, then stepped into a fast-moving production already running full speed down the track. The transition was abrupt.

“I had 10 days to unpack and pack,” he says of the 2024 shoot. “Unpack my character in Wes’ movie and then get dressed like Sensei and just … go. You don’t have time to adjust. If you want to jump on a carousel, you generally want time to run and catch up and then jump in. There was none of that.”

His first day filming was inside a real store in El Paso. There were no actors behind the counter, just the family who owned it. Anderson put DiCaprio and Del Toro in charge of communicating with the non-actors. “You guys are in charge,” Del Toro remembers Anderson telling them. “There’s a family here. They own the store.”

Del Toro went behind the counter and opened the register.

“And there’s real money from the store. And I’m taking money out of there. And the lady is sitting right next to me. She’s looking at me like this,” he says, widening his eyes. “And then I give it back when Paul called ‘cut.’ But that was her money, not prop money.”

The immediacy, the verity, the diving into the deep end — all of it created an instant connection among Del Toro, DiCaprio and the locals. It also realigned Del Toro and DiCaprio — megawatt stars who’d been industry pals since sharing the cover of Vanity Fair‘s 1996 Hollywood issue — in a deeper and more meaningful way.

“Suddenly there’s this connection between the non-actors and Leo and myself. And Leo and I, we talked a little bit about it. We were in charge here. This was our show. These non-actors were looking to us to know what to do,” Del Toro recalls. “And so for Leo and I, our heads instantly pointed in the same direction — it was a bonding moment.”

Penn, who plays the villainous Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, attended a special screening with Del Toro and DiCaprio. The program opened with a reel of career highlights for each of the actors. Penn found himself astounded as he relived each performance.

Del Toro evokes those stony screen giants of yore, towering tributes to American grit and masculinity like Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. The last two were his late father’s favorites.

“There’s a part of you that never leaves the theater seat where you were 17,” Penn says. “You’re watching your heroes up there. And then, suddenly, you’re sitting next to people who’ve become that for someone else.”

***

Growing up in the Del Toro family in Puerto Rico, there was an expectation of becoming a lawyer. Benicio’s grandfather practiced law, his father practiced it, and his mother passed the bar.

Benicio was a rambunctious and imaginative kid. Then, when he was 9, his mother died of hepatitis.

Nine is an unforgiving age. It’s old enough to remember the texture of a voice, the smell of someone’s hair, but too young to build any real architecture for grief.

“I’m still dealing with it,” Del Toro says. “I had my mother for nine years. What is crazy about losing a parent at that age is that there hasn’t been one day in my life that I haven’t thought about her.”

Years later, Del Toro had the opportunity to meet one of his heroes: the Japanese director Kaneto Shindo, whose classics include The Naked Island and Onibaba.

Shindo was 96 when Del Toro met him. Del Toro did background research and learned the director had lost his own mother at age 9, just as Del Toro had. He also learned Shindo, at 72, made a movie about her.

“And so I asked him,” Del Toro says, “because we understood each other regarding that particular scar. I asked, ‘Did that help deal with that pain? To make the film. Did it cure something? Did it repair something?’ “

Shindo sat quietly for several seconds.

“Absolutely nothing,” he said.

Del Toro laughs softly when he retells it, not because it’s funny, but because it’s just so definitive. When asked what he remembers of his mother, he says, “I remember everything.” She was strict, loving, committed to education. And in a line that lands like a joke and then settles into something more profound, he says, “I think some of my best acting was with her.”

Del Toro’s father remarried after his mother died, and Del Toro describes that period as chaotic. He was energetic, restless, distracted, the kind of kid who could disappear for a few hours and return just before the consequences arrived. He has a brother, two years older. The loss made them closer, he says, but they adapted differently.

“My brother, Gustavo, was a little bit more calm,” he says. “He would read more than I did. I didn’t read much when I was young. I was too distracted.”

Gustavo, a doctor, ultimately settled in Brooklyn, where he is now chief medical officer of a large hospital. Benicio lives in Brentwood, where he co-parents his daughter with Kimberly Stewart, daughter of Rod. The two never married, nor were they ever involved in any sort of public relationship. Beyond that, details are scant; in a coup for today’s Hollywood, Del Toro maintains an iron grip on his personal life.

At 13, he was sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania. The move was described as opportunity; his godmother hoped it would lead to law school. It registered instead as a rupture. The island’s humidity gave way to a cold that bit through moth-eaten sweaters. Spanish receded into the background.

Puerto Rico did not shrink into memory; it simply remained a faint pulse beating beneath everything new. When Del Toro returns to the island now, about once a year, he is hit with a tidal wave of feeling. He resists the suggestion that Puerto Rican identity and American identity must exist in opposition. “You can be both,” he says.

He talks about Puerto Rico’s status with the bluntness of someone who has explained it too many times and still manages to find it absurd.

Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since 1917, he notes, and under U.S. control since 1898. Puerto Ricans are American citizens. And yet, if you reside on the island, you cannot vote for president. You have no representation in Congress.

“That makes no sense,” he says, flatly.

Del Toro enrolled in business school at UC San Diego. Midway through his first semester, he was cast in a production of a one-act play called Action by Sam Shepard. He was entranced by Shepard’s lean, volatile writing and the wounded masculinity at its core. “So I changed my major to drama,” he says. “That’s when I kind of burned the ships, so to speak. I just said, ‘That’s it. I’m going to be an actor.’ ”

Coming into the professional acting world, he says, there were stereotypes. If you were Latino, you were offered shorthand. And you took the jobs because you needed to work.

“But my attitude has always been, I should be able to play anything,” he says. “And if they all have to have a last name that ends with an ‘O,’ I’ll make them different. Because Latinos are not all the same.”

***

Del Toro is a dad. His role as the protector in One Battle feels less theoretical in that light. When asked whether Sensei’s instinct to shield a father and daughter connects to his own life, he pauses, reluctant to speak of his daughter. He pivots to something more universal.

“There’s something about the altruism of humans,” he says. “When someone risks their life to save someone else, we clap.”

He talks about footage we see constantly now, on our phones, of strangers jumping into danger to save someone they do not know. A child pulled from a current. A person rescued from a burning car. A stranger shielding another stranger from harm.

“We all clap,” he says. “We make him a hero immediately. A star. Go talk to Oprah. Do the tour.” He pauses. “They don’t do it for the reward. It’s an instinct. It’s a human thing.”

That’s Sensei. The Good Samaritan. And in a film that’s almost oppressively dark, his instinct becomes the beacon. The signal the movie hasn’t given up on people. Because Sensei hasn’t given up on them.

“I think in the last months, there’s been a lot of senseis out there,” Del Toro says.

Just then, a woman loudly holding court at a nearby table narrates something about venture capital or divorce, maybe both. Del Toro is shaken out of his thought.

He doesn’t glare. He studies the woman with anthropological interest.

“That lady,” he says quietly.

Del Toro leans back in the banquette, eyes half-closed, listening the way he listens to everything.

“Ocean waves,” he says suddenly.

Another burst from the neighboring table. A laugh too loud for the room.

Del Toro shrugs.

“Ocean waves. Ocean waves.”

He nods. Stands. Adjusts the Oakland A’s cap. The lobby is still humming. The loud woman is still narrating her own importance.

Del Toro slips out without competing.

Ocean waves.

This story appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.