The acting advice Christopher Walken gave that Benicio del Toro never forgot
One of the results of Paul Thomas Anderson making the superb One Battle After Another last year, aside from people in east London bars unironically wearing dressing gowns and shouting ‘Viva La Revolucion!’, was that we were all reminded of what a cool dude/very good actor Benicio del Toro is.
He fairly sailed through the unrelenting action in that movie without breaking even a bead of sweat on his head as the martial arts master and champion of illegal immigrants, and in the process gained a new generation of fans to go with the ones he’d made in films like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic back at the start of the century, which won him a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar.
The Puerto Rican definitely seems to excel in a certain kind of movie, often ones that involve some aspect of the US-Mexican border, as you can see in Denis Villeneuve’s 2015’s thriller Sicario, which saw del Toro team up with Emily Blunt in a movie so tense that watching it is like walking on a tightrope between tall buildings while being watched by a hungry lion and carrying a bomb that you have to diffuse within 30 seconds. While needing a wee.
Del Toro has refined his craft over a long period of time now, and he first came to worldwide recognition thanks to the brilliant Bryan Singer-directed 1995 crime film The Usual Suspects, in which he played seasoned but unintelligible criminal Fred Fenster in the twisting tale of con men and mobsters.
He’d been doing background character work for some seven years or so before landing that part, in movies including James Bond’s 1989 adventure License to Kill, but Usual Suspects was definitely the turning point for him.
After making four more movies in quick succession, he was cast in a 1997 crime comedy called Excess Baggage alongside Christopher Walken and led by Alicia Silverstone. While the film itself was something of a commercial disaster, it did at least give Del Toro the chance to soak up some knowledge from one of the best in the business.
Del Toro told the In the Envelope podcast, “If I may quote the great Christopher Walken, he gave me one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever heard an actor give another actor, which was: ‘If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything’. One of the first people I started to imitate was my dad. And when he said nothing, everybody perked up. So when he said something, everybody perked up.”
The actor evidently used that advice to his benefit, as he not only picked up the Academy Award for Traffic, but also gained a nomination for 2003’s 21 Grams, plus another for One Battle Another. He was unlucky to miss out in 2008 for his two-part epic collaboration with Soderbergh titled Che, about Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara, with even the eventual winner Sean Penn publicly stating he should have been recognised by the Academy, but he did win ‘Best Actor’ at the Cannes Film Festival.
After taking the lead role in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme last year, Del Toro will now star alongside Cameron Diaz in a film from music video director Grant Singer called Reenactment, plot details of which are currently a closely guarded secret.
