Benicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez is a Puerto Rican actor. His accolades include an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Goya Award, and the Best Actor awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. Films in which he has appeared have grossed over $5.9 billion worldwide.
Del Toro made his film debut in Big Top Pee-wee before his breakout role playing an unintelligible crook in the crime thriller The Usual Suspects, followed by roles in Basquiat, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Snatch. He received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a morally upright police officer in the Steven Soderbergh's crime drama Traffic, and was nominated in the same category for playing an ex-con in Alejandro González Iñárritu's thriller 21 Grams and for playing a karate teacher in Paul Thomas Anderson's action comedy One Battle After Another. He has since acted in Sin City, Che, Savages, Inherent Vice, Sicario and its sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado and No Sudden Move.
He also took franchise roles such as Lawrence Talbot in The Wolfman, the Collector in three films from 2013 to 2018 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and DJ the Codebreaker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. He acted in the Wes Anderson films The French Dispatch and The Phoenician Scheme. On television, he portrayed Richard Matt in the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora, for which he received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.
Early life
Del Toro was born on February 19, 1967, in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Gustavo Adolfo del Toro Bermúdez and Fausta Genoveva Sánchez Rivera, who were both lawyers. He has an older brother, Gustavo, who is the executive vice president and chief medical officer at the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York City. He had a Catalan paternal great-grandfather and a Basque maternal great-grandmother. Del Toro's great-grandfather was Rafael Rivera Esbrí, one of the heroes of the El Polvorin fire in Ponce, and who would also later become mayor of that city.He spent most of his infancy in Santurce, a barrio within San Juan. Del Toro, whose childhood nicknames were "Skinny Benny" and "Beno", was raised a Roman Catholic, and attended Academia del Perpetuo Socorro, a Roman Catholic school in Miramar, Puerto Rico. When del Toro was nine years old, his mother died of hepatitis. At age 15, he moved with his father and brother to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where he was enrolled at the Mercersburg Academy. He spent his adolescence and attended high school there. After graduation, del Toro followed the advice of his father and pursued a business degree at the University of California, San Diego. Success in an elective drama course encouraged him to drop out of college and study with noted acting teachers Stella Adler and Arthur Mendoza, in Los Angeles, as well as at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City.
Career
1987–1999: Early roles and breakthrough
Del Toro surfaced in small television roles during the late 1980s, playing mostly thugs and drug dealers on programs such as Miami Vice and the NBC miniseries Drug Wars: The Camarena Story. He appeared in the 1987 music video for Madonna's song "La Isla Bonita" as a background character sitting on a car hood. Film roles followed, beginning with his debut in Big Top Pee-wee and as Dario in the James Bond film Licence to Kill. Del Toro was noticed by directors and starred in such successful films as The Indian Runner, China Moon, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, Money for Nothing, Fearless and Swimming with Sharks.His career gained momentum in 1995 with his breakout performance in The Usual Suspects, where he played the mumbling, wisecracking Fred Fenster. The role won him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male and established him as a character actor. This led to stronger roles in independent and major studio films, including playing Gaspare in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral and winning a second consecutive Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his work as Benny Dalmau in Basquiat, directed by his friend, film-maker and painter Julian Schnabel. Del Toro also shared the screen with Robert De Niro in the big-budget thriller The Fan, in which he played Juan Primo, a charismatic Puerto Rican baseball star. He subsequently starred opposite Alicia Silverstone in Excess Baggage, which Silverstone produced. For Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1998 film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's famous book, despite the status of sex symbol he gained more than 40 lbs. to play Dr. Gonzo, Thompson's lawyer and drug-fiend cohort.
2000–2012: ''Traffic'' and other films
Del Toro's performances in four films in 2000 gained him a mainstream audience. First, the crime yarn The Way of the Gun reunited him with The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie. A few months later, he stood out among a first-rate ensemble cast in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, a complex dissection of the North American drug wars. As Javier Rodriguez—a Mexican border policeman struggling to remain honest amid the corruption and deception of illegal drug trafficking—del Toro, who spoke most of his lines in Spanish, gave a performance that dominated the film. His performance swept all of the major critics' awards in 2001. Del Toro won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the fourth living Oscar winner whose winning role was a character who speaks predominantly in a non-English language. Del Toro is also the third Puerto Rican actor to win an Oscar, after Jose Ferrer and Rita Moreno. The year he won his Oscar marked the first time that two actors born in Puerto Rico were nominated in the same category. In his acceptance speech, del Toro thanked the people of both Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora and dedicated his award to them. In addition to the Oscar, he also won the Golden Globe Award and the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Traffic was also a success at the box office. This was soon followed by a small role as the diamond thief Franky Four Fingers in Guy Ritchie's hip caper comedy Snatch and a role as a mentally challenged Native American man in The Pledge, directed by his old friend Sean Penn.In 2003, del Toro appeared in two films: The Hunted, co-starring Tommy Lee Jones and the drama 21 Grams, co-starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. He went on to earn another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in the latter. He then appeared in the film adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez, and Things We Lost in the Fire, the English-language debut of celebrated Danish director Susanne Bier.
In 2008, del Toro was awarded the Prix d'interpretation masculine at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Che Guevara in the biographical films The Argentine and Guerrilla. During his acceptance speech, del Toro dedicated his award "to the man himself, Che Guevara" along with director Steven Soderbergh. Del Toro was also awarded the 2009 Goya Award as the Best Actor for his portrayal of Guevara. Sean Penn, who won the 2009 Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Milk, remarked that he was surprised and disappointed that Che and del Toro were not also up for any Academy Award nominations. During his acceptance speech for the Best Actor award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Penn expressed his dismay stating, "The fact that there aren't crowns on Soderbergh's and del Toro's heads right now, I don't understand... that is such a sensational movie, Che." For the final portions of the film, del Toro shed 35 pounds to show how ill Guevara had become near the end of his life in the jungles of Bolivia. In 2010, del Toro starred in and produced the remake of Lon Chaney Jr.'s classic cult film The Wolf Man. He was chosen to be the face of the 2011 Campari calendar, becoming the first male model to be featured in the Italian liquor company's calendar.
2013–present: franchise films and expansion
Del Toro played The Collector in a mid-credits scene of Marvel Studios' superhero film Thor: The Dark World and later reprised his role in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War. In September 2015, del Toro played Alejandro Gillick in the critically acclaimed Sicario, about a Mexican ex-prosecutor seeking revenge for the slaying of his wife and daughter working with a CIA special ops team to bring down the leader of a powerful and brutal Mexican drug cartel. Film critics widely praised his performance. Del Toro reprised his role in the sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado. In 2016, del Toro appeared in a Heineken television advertisement in its More Behind the Star series. The gag in the spot is that fans frequently mistake him for fellow actor Antonio Banderas, much to del Toro's chagrin. In 2017, he played DJ, a supporting antagonist in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, who betrayed Rose and Finn to save himself when they were apprehended on the First Order's flagship.In 2021, del Toro starred in the Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch as Moses Rosenthaler, a mentally disturbed artist. He collaborated with the director once again in 2025 with The Phoenician Scheme. Also in 2025, del Toro received critical acclaim for his role as karate teacher and community leader Sergio St. Carlos in Paul Thomas Anderson's film One Battle After Another. For his work, he received Supporting Actor prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the National Board of Review, as well as Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.