“He was like a god to me”: the one actor Guillermo del Toro deified
Guillermo del Toro has always been a bold voice within cinema, bridging the gap between stories made for adults and children by blending the two with his horror-like fairytales. His films can be characterised by their weighty subject matter and fantastical story worlds, creating a surrealist world that somewhat resembles the nightmares and dreams we had as children but with an existentialist undercurrent as his characters delve into dark underworlds that expose the injustices in our waking world.
The director has made stars out of younger actors and worked with world-renowned performers like Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, and Sally Hawkins, but throughout his gothic career, he has named one actor that he continues to place on a pedestal.
Cronos, directed in 1992, follows an antique dealer who discovers an object that grants eternal life and youth, as well as an appetite for blood. It is deeply unsettling, with a sinister core and a likeness to the body horror genre that almost resembles the work of David Cronenberg. However, the director remembers the film for uniting him with Federico Luppi, the great Argentinian actor who later worked with him on The Devil’s Backbone and who remains the performer he admires the most.
Federico Luppi is most known for his collaborations with Del Toro, with a unique working style that slightly contradicts the unspoken code between the actor and director. When asked about his relationship with Luppi and their work on The Devil’s Backbone, Del Toro said, “I think that it was a far better experience for Federico as an actor to work with me this time in Devil’s Backbone than in Cronos because in Cronos I was daunted. He was like a god to me–I always admired him. I kept looking at him and thinking, ‘Oh my lord, that’s Federico Luppi’–and it’s funny, he confessed to me during Backbone, ‘Y’know, I never understood that fucking film. I was going by what you told me but the whole time I was thinking, what the fuck is that guy doing?’ I said to him, ‘Well, now we know’.”
Sometimes, the experience of working with someone you greatly admire can be extremely intimidating and daunting, leading you to feel shy in expressing yourself and being assertive in your ideas. But when asked about how this changed during the production of his 2001 film, Del Toro explained, “I felt it was ten times the actor/director collaboration over the first”.
He added: “His performance is extremely nuanced, I’ll tell you that there was one day we were doing take after take after take on just one small moment and I said to him, ‘You have to give me this emotion’–and he says, ‘I’m giving it to you’. I just didn’t see it and he says, ‘Wait for dailies’. It was magic. I went to dailies and fuck, there it was. He’s just so nuanced. He’s in essence a guy that does nothing, that is completely useless but well-intentioned. I learned a great deal from Luppi’s craft and experience”.
This almost sounds like an insult, as Del Toro is praising Luppi’s insolence and how this ultimately enhanced their working relationship and his performance in the film, but it is undoubtedly an unconventional way of working and something that many directors would not appreciate.
But alas, Luppi seems to be able to pull this off through an intensely commanding screen presence and authoritative nature that only caused Del Toro to admire him further and ultimately, it is enriching for any director to be challenged in their ideas and encouraged to think in new ways.
