Benicio Del Toro Biography

CIVIL STATUS
Professions Actor, Producer , Executive Producer plus
Birth Name Benicio Monserrate Rafael Del Toro Sanchez
Nationality American
Born 19 February 1967 (Santurce, Puerto Rico)
BIOGRAPHY
Benicio Del Toro was born in Puerto Rico to two lawyer parents and moved to the United States at the age of twelve. After high school, he began studying economics at the University of San Diego, which he eventually dropped out to train as an actor. He studied first at the Stella Adler Conservatory in Los Angeles and then at the prestigious Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York. He began his career in television and after brief appearances in several series, including an episode of Two Cops in Miami, and in Big Top Peewee (1988), the actor played a henchman battling James Bond in Licence to Kill (1989). At the age of 21, he became the youngest opponent ever faced Agent 007.

From then on, he played a series of small roles in works that moved away from the big Hollywood machinery: The Indian Runner (1991), Sean Penn’s directorial debut, who would call on him again ten years later for The Pledge, Second State (1993) by Peter Weir, the corrosive Swimming with Sharks (1994) and Usual suspects (1995) by Bryan Singer which reveals him to the general public as a mannered gangster.

Apart from a participation in Tony Scott’s The Fan (1997), Benicio Del Toro remained faithful to independent cinema by making a name for himself in Basquiat (1996) by Julian Schnabel and Our Funeral (id.) by Abel Ferrara. Totally involved in his roles, he went so far as to gain twenty kilos to play the travelling companion of journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) in Terry Gilliam’s Paranoid Las Vegas (1998). Acting as a Latin Sean Penn, he likes to surround his personality with mystery and to accept roles that are not very “talkative” such as those of the “disjointed” gangster Franky Four Fingers in Snatch (2000), the kidnapper overwhelmed by the events of Way of the gun (id.) and the soldier-turned-killer in The Hunted (2003).

The consecration came in 2001 with Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic: his performance as a disillusioned Mexican policeman earned him the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival and a multitude of other awards. Highly coveted in Hollywood, Benicio Del Toro chose to shoot only sparingly, setting his sights on original and risky projects such as Sin City (2005) and characters of misfits (ex-convict in 21 grams, heroin addict in Our Burnt Memories).

In 2009, Benico Del Toro stepped into the shoes of Che in a biopic composed of two feature films directed by Steven Soderbergh. For the second time alongside the director, he won the Best Actor Award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. Unfortunately, and despite the actor’s investment, both films were abject box office failures, as was Wolfman two years later. Undeterred, but becoming rarer on the big screen, Benico Del Toro went behind the camera in one of the segments of 7 Days in Havana, presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, to then join Oliver Stone in Savages, a film whose central themes (cartels and drug trafficking, etc.) are not new to the comedian.

The following year, Benicio del Toro returned to Cannes to present Jimmy P, an autobiographical drama by Frenchman Arnaud Desplechin for which, in the guise of North American American veteran Jimmy Picard, he underwent intense psychotherapy led by a philanthropic ethnopsychiatrist played by Mathieu Amalric. In 2014, he was seen unrecognizable in the Marvel blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy, where he lent the exceptional acting qualities that we know him to the character of the Collector. He then defended the thriller Paradise Lost, in which he played no more and no less than Pablo Escobar…

In 2015, Benicio del Toro again took part in a film about drug cartels. With Denis Villeneuve’s violent Sicario, the actor slips into the shoes of a former prosecutor who, following the murder of his family, has himself become a killer in order to hunt down traffickers… Alongside the blockbusters Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and Avengers: Infinity War (2017) in which he appears, Benicio del Toro reprises this interesting role in Soldado, the sequel to Sicario entirely dedicated to this character.