Benicio Del Toro: Playboy Interview

In 2004 the Internet went white-hot with rumors that Benicio Del Toro had shared an erotic encounter with Scarlett Johansson in an elevator at L.A.’s oasis of the cool, crazy and clandestine, the Chateau Marmont. Johansson has denied the story many times with a typically snappy dismissal. The not-snappy but more interesting Del Toro, who is 17 years older than Johansson, stumbled around his words. He said, “Did I ever have sex in an elevator with Scarlett Johansson after an awards show? I kind of, like, you know…well, I don’t know. Let’s leave that to somebody’s imagination. Let’s not promote it. I’m sure it’s happened before. It might not be the last time either.”

The only intriguing aspect of the brouhaha—which Del Toro now flatly denies in this interview—was its fleeting spotlight on the private life of the highly reticent Del Toro. His on-screen fearlessness and charisma earned him the 2001 best supporting actor Oscar for Traffic, a 2004 Oscar nomination for 21 Grams and the 2008 Cannes best actor award for Che, but his personal life is more shaded, fiercely guarded and usually off limits—but not, apparently, because of a finger-wagging studio boss or controlling publicist. It seems this is who Del Toro is. And who he is has been working very nicely for him.His 1995 breakout as the mumbling ex-con in The Usual Suspects, for instance, had critics and journalists wondering where the hulking Brando-esque enigma had been slouching. Right under their nose, it turns out. Del Toro had inched his way up in such miniseries as Drug Wars: The Camarena Story and on the big screen playing heavy-lidded and offbeat characters in Big Top Pee-wee and Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner.

It seems inevitable that Del Toro would earn fame for playing outsiders. A native of Santurce, Puerto Rico, he has an older brother, and his parents were both lawyers. When Del Toro was nine, his mother, who had introduced him to poetry and painting, died of hepatitis at the age of 33. When he was 13 his now-remarried father relocated him and his brother to Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where Del Toro, shy and speaking little English, dealt with culture shock while attending boarding school and high school.

Upon graduation he attended the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in business. He showed such promise performing in student stage productions, however, that he ditched college for New York to study at the Circle in the Square Theatre School and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. In the late 1980s he moved to Los Angeles and slowly worked his way up to co-starring roles with Alicia Silverstone in Excess Baggage and in the Jack Nicholson drama The Pledge. He earned a rep for scary dedication to his art—burning his arm with cigarettes and packing on 40 pounds for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—and turned up on the lists of the world’s most beautiful people and eligible bachelors. He even dated such beauties as Silverstone, Claire Forlani, Heather Graham, Valeria Golino and Chiara Mastroianni without becoming a tabloid fixture or nightlife casualty.

The ever-unpredictable Del Toro, 42, is staying true to himself by co-starring with Daniel Day-Lewis in director Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a drama about missionaries in 17th century Japan. And this February he stars in a remake of the 1940s chiller The Wolf Man, co-starring Anthony Hopkins.

We sent contributing editor Stephen Rebello (who most recently interviewed Clive Owen for Playboy) to speak with Del Toro in Los Angeles. He reports, “You don’t figure on Del Toro’s being straight line or average in any way, and he isn’t. He meets questions with pauses, ellipses. He shifts in his seat and squints constantly. But his eccentricity isn’t an interview dodge. After spending time with him, it’s clear he’s warm and generous hearted, with a mile-wide streak of movie geek.”