The best Benicio del Toro scene you’ll never see: “Halfway through the film, I didn’t care”
After watching Benicio del Toro drunkenly dance around in front of the police in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, you might think you’ve seen the actor’s best scene.
You might also be forgiven for thinking the same thing after seeing him in any number of scenes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but due to a cut scene from Sicario, we’ll never really be sure.
Dennis Villeneuve’s 2015 Mexican border crime thriller features del Toro as a hardened Mexican prosecutor turned hitman, working alongside the FBI and CIA on a mission to take down a drug cartel. As is to be expected from Villeneuve, it’s one of those smart, all guns blazing action movies that is actually really bloody good; I mean, what else is to be expected when Roger Deakins is the director of photography.
Speaking to del Toro on the podcast aptly named Team Deakins, which he runs with his wife, Deakins lamented a scene that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film. “[Remember] there was that wonderful scene we shot on down on a beach in Mexico with you in the water with this general,” the DP asked, “and it was really beautiful, and then it wasn’t in the film.”
While the actor admitted that he was initially worried that Villeneuve would cut the scene, pondering if it would maybe make it in as a dream sequence, he was actually glad the scene didn’t make it in the end.
“Halfway through the film, I didn’t care about it,” he admitted to Deakins, explaining that while the shot was beautiful, it was superfluous to the story.
It takes a lot to kill your darlings, as they say, but for del Toro, the less the audience knew about his character, the better. “It helped keep my character shrouded in mystery,” explained the actor, “We just don’t know him”.
While neither Deakins nor del Toro went into detail about the specifics of the scene, the actor was vocal about his belief in that age-old piece of filmmaking advice of “show, don’t tell”. It’s made clear in the film that his family have been killed by this cartel, and it has been somewhat of a motivating factor for him, but the actor thought the less said by his character the better.
So presumably, this wonderful scene that we’ll never get to witness has something to do with his character, Alejandro Gillick’s back story. Clearly, del Toro is much more sensitive to the destructive power of exposition than many of even the best filmmakers, understanding that sometimes what isn’t shown is much more powerful than what is.
And that sometimes, you have to sacrifice a beautiful shot or a well-acted scene for the success of the film as a whole, but damn, I bet you wish you could see this one.
