Benicio's Che of reckoning

Huh? Can this really be Benicio Del Toro? Where is the Lee Marvin growl? The monosyllabic intensity? The weighty thinking? None of these things are in evidence today. This guy sitting beside me is a jolly, laid back soul who makes me think the body snatchers have been at work.

Even his brooding, Byronic looks seem lighter and far more boyish in person. An uncanny resemblance to a younger Brad Pitt, hitherto unnoticed, shines through. Indeed, if he wasn’t wearing a silver Grim Reaper ring, I’d have figured this chap for a boy band heartthrob, not one of this generation’s most intense screen actors.
“The ladies do seem to love this ring,” he purrs in his trademark Puerto Rican drawl. “I don’t know why but they do.”
Yep. I guess this is why Scarlett Johansson famously jumped him in an elevator.
Still, I can’t help but wonder where all the danger has gone. This is Benicio Del Toro for Chrissake, an actor who has lived up to his bullish name and then some. The fierce menace that has defined his onscreen life in The Usual Suspects and Licence To Kill, the tortured, exquisite pain brought to Things We Lost In The Fire and 21 Grams, the feral insanity of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and The Funeral – all these things are absent about his person. It appears this playful, personable fellow is an even better actor than I ever imagined.
“I’m never aware of going for darker parts on purpose,” he smiles. “I’m just going with the flow.”
In the circumstances it seems only fair that this much-lauded thespian is finally making the transition from cult hero to leading man proper. Che, Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four hour biopic about Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara grants an epic platform for Del Toro’s headlining performance.
“For me Che Guevara began with a Rolling Stones song,” Del Toro laughs. “‘Little Indian Girl’ from the album Emotional Rescue. I was twelve and that was the first time I heard the name. Later on – I was almost 20 I guess – I bought a book of his letters to his family in Mexico City. I was getting into Kerouac and Hemingway at the time so I was really blown away that there was this Latin American guy doing the same thing except that his On The Road wasn’t fictionalised. It was the real thing. So I got the t-shirt but that didn‘t work out so good. Guys I knew kept shouting ‘Hey man, you look like that dude’. I thought he looked more like my cousin myself.”
Stepping into Che’s shoes, however, would prove just as logistically tricky as a guerrilla march on Havana. Del Toro and director Soderbergh have been attempting to get the project off the ground since they collaborated on the Oscar winning Traffic back in 2000. Terrence Malick was onboard for a time. A 2004 production was abandoned when financial backing fell through.
“It was always going to be difficult,” says Del Toro. “We knew that. We were making a four-and-a-half hour movie about Che Guevara. Now, that’s probably the shortest movie on Che that could be done. Because we wanted to get in there and spend time with him. We wanted to spend two years in the Cuban jungle with him. We wanted to get to New York, to the belly of the beast, where he had his spotlight moment in the ‘60s, where he got to stand there and tell everybody what was wrong with their world. We wanted to get to Bolivia because that was the second time when he renounced all power in favour of revolution. There was just a lot of stuff like that we needed to squeeze in. But try telling that to the money people.”
Has Del Toro’s lengthy, determined struggle to bring Che to the masses any political purpose, I wonder? Is this a campaigning film in that sense?
“Well, yeah,” he says with a note of hesitancy lest anyone mistake him for a raving unreconstructed Commie. “There has to be a will there to force yourself to do something. The fact that when I was a student, he was a totally peripheral figure. The fact that he wasn’t taught at my school. The fact that he believed in so many great things. The fact he stood against the exploitation of women and children. The fact that he was a warrior. He was like Jesus rushing into the temple to throw the tables over. He just wasn’t prepared to turn the other cheek. He‘s Jesus with bullets.”
It’s a neat comparison when one considers the time Del Toro had to spend in the wilderness during the shoot. Made for a measly $40 million budget over 79 days, Che required the Hollywood star to live in mud, get into punching fights with mules and tough it out with the elements.
“In that way, but only in that way, this has to be the worst movie I’ve ever done,” he laughs. “There wasn’t even a chair on set. There was no place to rest. You just had to keep on going, keep on making the movie, keep on willing this thing into existence.”
His dedication to the cause is genuinely impressive. The 41-year-old has spent seven years solidly researching his subject and, my goodness, it shows. He spends much of our time together pondering Che’s motivations and how they dovetail and diverge from his own sensibilities.
“It’s like this,” he says suddenly, in the middle of what might have been a prayer to Joe Strummer. “Che was a product of the ‘60s and he was a human being. There’s an execution in the film because he believed in the death penalty. Does that make him a terrorist or an evil man? Not unless every American president going back to Abraham Lincoln was also a terrorist and an evil man. I don’t believe in the death penalty but I’m never put in a situation where I need to. I was watching the news here last night and it was about some guy who broke his baby’s back. I spent hours thinking ‘how can I not believe in the death penalty when I want to kill that guy myself?’ It’s tricky, you know?”
Like Che and rather unlike the lowlife Latino roles Del Toro has often found himself occupying, the actor hails from an impeccably middle-class background. Both his parents were lawyers who hoped young Benicio would follow them into the family trade and his brother is currently a noted paediatric oncologist in Manhattan.
The cosy, academic life of the young Benicio was, however, rocked to its foundations when his mother died from hepatitis. Four years later, just after his 13th birthday, the family moved from his native Puerto Rico to America. At his father’s suggestion he attempted a degree in business at the University of San Diego before dropping out and falling in with the method-minded actors of the Stella Adler school.
“I’m a method guy and I’m not a method guy,” he tells me. “I like to do a lot of research and get into a role but then again, when I got fat and drunk for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas nobody would hire me for like years because they thought I must be fat and drunk. So I guess I know the limitations of method. I’m not like some crazy dude who’ll do anything. Do I look crazy?”
Erm, no. Surprisingly un-crazy I would have said.
“Right. So I know not to do anything that’s going to kill me. If I did that would kind of screw up the next scene, don’t you think?”

Che (Part 2) opens February 20