Benicio Del Toro for FLAUNT Magazine
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Transcript of Benicio Del Toro for FLAUNT Magazine
8/3/2019 Benicio Del Toro for FLAUNT Magazine
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/benicio-del-toro-for-flaunt-magazine 1/6
ENICIO
DELTORO
the feral nature of
and the impossibility of man P h o T o G r A P h y : K U r T I s w A r I E N K o
A T I s w A r I E N K o . c
o M . s
T y L I s T : B E c K s w E L c h F o r T h E w A L L G r o U P . c o M . G
r o o M E r : G
A I L r y A N F o r c r I T E r I o N - G r o U P . c o M .
written by Gregg LaGambina photographed by Kurt Iswarienko
BDENIMJAcKET By Levi’s,
s w EATsh IrT B y James
Perse, T- sh Ir T B y
aLternative vintage,
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8/3/2019 Benicio Del Toro for FLAUNT Magazine
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puerto rican man with a hangdog look
rubs at his tired eyes. A blosso of hard
silver—a lion’s head worn on his left ring
nger—stares bac out at the room, up-
side down. Rain whips at the windows,
sounding lie handfuls of small marbles
thrown by hoodlums in search of a dumb
ght. A patio table hops and upends, its
umbrella snapped open by a gust, drag-
ging the entire contraption out into the street. An old lady draped in
clear plastic, a yellow cane hooed around her thin left wrist, peers
into the storefront, agape. A
quic glimpse of messy teeth
disappears behind the cloud of
her exhale.“She was looing at
you!” exclaims the Puerto Ri -
can man, startled, as the wom-
an bacs into the storm and
continues along her path.
The city is not itself.
Brentwood, the wealthy west-
ern enclae of Los Angeles, is
a mess of ooded storm drains
and deep puddles thrown into
the air in foamy explosions by
passing sedans. The agitated
wetness everywhere sounds
lie tin foil being unspooled in
giant sheets, the metallic rattle
maing eerything and eery-
one nervous.
The Puerto Rican
man holding court at a corner
table inside this Spanish res-taurant is Benicio Del Toro.
The melancholic mumbler
that made him well nown in
The Usual Suspects years ago
is long gone. The eyes oft de-
scribed as drooped, sad, slow,
are in fact darting around the
room now, settling on nothing,
seeing out cues to propel his
stories. The tal is quic and
clear. And in harmony with the
preailing mood (right before
that mad woman tapped at the
glass with a dry dirty nger -
nail), Del Toro was describing lagoons and hunchbacs and the jit-
tery light that icered through his childhood home.
“The rst moies I remember seeing as a id actually
weren’t the moies,” he says. “They were these super-8 moies.
They would play for three minutes. They were edited from horror
ovies. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Dracula. Frankenstein,The Mummy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame —that’s the only hoe
entertainment I can recall as a id. We’d put all this monster stuff
together and project it on the wall with an old projector.”
Del Toro’s childhood was brief. Uprooted from his birth -
place in San Juan, Puerto Rico at age nine, after the death of his
mother, Del Toro found himself in rural Pennsylania, enrolled in
boarding school, and enduring a brand of military-style parenting
necessarily improised by his father in the wae of fresh circum-
stance. In ushering along the recent remae of The Wolfman, Del
Toro might just be aiming to recapture those moments in the dar,
hidden fro the deands of adulthood when his faily was still in-
tact, at home, where he belonged.
“What, now I’m taling to a psychiatrist?” laughs Del Toro, put-
ting on a puffed-up tough-guy demeanor to moc any notion of a
tormented childhood. “Fuc off! They told me to wear a suit and tie!
Fuc all of you! They told me to wash my hands before dinner. Go
fuc yourself! I’m different!’”
He adits that after the labor-intensive shoot for Steven
Soderbergh’s Che, he was desperate to hae fun again and The
Wolfman afforded him the op-
portunity to channel some of the
fantasies he’s carried with him
eer since he glared at those ric -ety projections of monsters in his
youth. The tepid response—both
critically and commercially—
to the four-hour plus biopic of
Cuban (by way of Argentina)
reolutionary Che Gueara was
a disappointment. During press
for the lm, he was consistently
put on the defensie by questions
concerning Gueara’s legacy of
iolence. He famously waled
out of one interiew. The lm
opped in the States.
“Moies come at you. They
don’t care what you thin,” he
says, pondering the potential leg-
acy of Che. “I thin it taes time.
Things can get better as time goes
by. The same thing can happen
with a boo, a painting. And also, probably with nature. You might
see a tree that you’e been loo -
ing at all your life and then one
day it just clics and one day you
go, ‘That’s a beautiful tree.’ Not
eerything is lie that. Not eery-
thing you do can be lie that. But
hopefully Che has that. I hope so.
That was the hardest ovie ever.”
After a similar reaction t o Terry
Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S.
Thompson’s Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas in 1998, it was re-
ported that Del Toro was so disap -
pointed by the lm’s reception, he too time off until appearing in
Guy Ritchie’s Snatch two years later. It was speculated that after his
full inestment in the character of Dr. Gono—the weight gain, the
self-inicted cigarette burns, the near perpetual dementia—his con-
dence was shaen, particularly after his performance was singled out
for being unnecessarily oer the top. Whether or not there’s any truthin these claims, the lm has been redeemed by exactly the ind of
slow boil he anticipates for Che. And oer a decade after the fact, it’s
clear that if he eer did gie a shit, he doesn’t gie a shit anymore.
“Hunter saw the moie and he lied it. He really lied it.
I now I can spea for Johnny [Depp], too. That is the best com -
pliment we got. And Fear and Loathing eventually found its own
audience.”
A waiter scurries away to nd more coffee. Someone is out-
A
102 FLAUNTMAGAZINE
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side gathering the scattered umbrellas and plastic chairs strewn
across the wet lawn. The notes of sirens off in the distance distort
and bend on the wind. The whole day is gray except for a lone traf -
c light that seems superimposed on the sy, dangling from a wire
aboe an intersection and bleeding bright colors onto the blea
scene lie something articially coloried and dropped into an old
blac and white moie. Del Toro ddles with his lion ring. There’s
a lull.
“Are you a Leo?”
“No.”
“Any signicance to
that ring there?”
“No, not really.”
The town car Del
Toro arrived in waits outsidelooing lie a recently bathed
blac animal. The engine is
on, exhaust billowing out in
white tufts lie it’s taing
deep breaths after a sprint. The
drier inside is eeping warm
on what is considered a cold
day for Southern California.
Del Toro tosses an American
Express gold card into a blac
plastic tray, but maes no ges -
ture to get up. It is probably
for this reason (and a thousand
others) that he’s a good actor.
The silence doesn’t mae him
the least bit uncomfortable.
He’s too comfortable, actually.
He’s said alost nothing about
hiself. He’s revealed little.
The driver will have to wait.“Do you have any
idea what a man is supposed to
be lie?”
It’s a half-court Hail
Mary heae; a Barbara Walters-
styled bullshit question. But
what the fuc. There’s more coffee. The weather is bad. That woman
might still be out there with her goddamned cane and that loo in her
eyes. You’re sitting at a table with Benicio Del Toro. Why the fuc not
as him, “What is a man?” Is it really any better or worse than asing
him how long it too eery morning to mae him loo lie a fucing
werewolf? Thought so. Go mae your own coffee. Come bac. We’ll
be right here.
“I’ll tell you one thing I don’t lie. I don’t lie it when
people lie. I can understand if someone is on a mission. But when
people at out lie to your face, and you catch them in that lie, and
then they lie again. That shit I don’t lie. You now what I mean?”
This is Benicio Del Toro. This is coming from some-
where. Notions of manhood? Boredom? The rain?
“I lost my mom when I was ery young,” he continues, pursuing the thought. “For a while it was just me and my brother
and my dad. And my dad was ROTC. He was ery strict. ‘Gotta get
up! Gotta mae the bed! Shine your shoes on Sunday!’ What maes
a fucing man? I don’t now. What maes anyone? I don’t thin a
man has to be macho. I thought that when I was 16. Sometimes I still
feel lie I’m 12. But I realie I can’t jump as high. I can’t deal with a
hangoer as easy as I could bac in the day. But that’s just life, man.
You go through it. I don’t now if I’m eer gonna gure it out.
“Maybe the thing I lie the most when I meet someone—
an or a woan—is their ability to see that everyone is d
The ability to see that you can be smart in different way
when they try to pigeonhole eeryone. Eerything you do h
this or that.”
Someone across the room gets up from his table an
goodbye. Benicio smiles and waes bac. A couple embra
holding the door open for the other. The place is almost
There’s an entire section with c
on tables. The rain has stopped.
er is erasing words from a chal
“Are you where you
be at this point in your life?”
Now that’s just an
fumble. But he graciously gra
and if he doesn’t run with it, hea noble jog. A good sport, Del
“After Trafc, I was y
class. Before Trafc, I was yin
Between The Usual Suspects a
c, I was ying in the bulhead
the cocpit now. I’e earned it.
gae it to me. I’e earned it and
doing it. So far, I do. You no
been doing ovies now for a lo
I lie to pretend I’m still 21,
been doing moies for 22 years
a long time. I started young. I di
ish college. I had no idea about
Nothing about moies. But I n
seen life. I new I had a lot mo
that age because of my upbring
happened. It came at me in som
I new I had things I could draw
found myself experiencing som
didn’t now I was going to expI was 19. I was so young.”
He sighs and smiles
ing to arvel at all that tie. H
down at the table.
“Are you going to
midlife crisis? Right here, righ
“No. Fuc no! My crisis was six years ago. Da
been a long road I’e been waling through. The reali ty h
we’re all gonna die.’ There was a whole year where I wa
‘Oh fuc, oh fuc, oh fuc.’ But then you’re lie, ‘What
do?’ Nothing. There’s things I enjoy now that I neer e
before.”
Let’s pretend here at precisely this moment that
breas through the clouds after its daylong determination t
Illumination pours through the window of a Spanish resta
reeal two men seated with two coffees at a corner table. O
gets up, shaes hands with the other and politely depart
outside, the departing man bends slightly, grabs at his c
enters into a waiting blac town car. The car dries off.
The other man, still inside the restaurant, waits a mand reaches to turn off his tape recorder. He has an idea.
from his chair now. He’s outside. He’s moing brisly d
damp sidewal. And when he nds that old woman with
low cane and the mortal stare and the plastic coat, he’s goin
her right there in the street, “Do you hae any idea what a
is supposed to be lie?”
What else would you do on a rainy day in Bre
after the actor Benicio Del Toro has told you oer a cup o
that we’re all going to die?
rAINcoATBy Prada , BUTToN-
DowN s h Ir T B y rrL, 501
JEANs By Levi’s, ANDBooTs
By metroPoLitanview AT
shoEMETro.coM.
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“MAYBE THE THINGI LIkE THE mOST
WHEN I MEET
SOmEONE—mANOR A WOMAN—ISTHEIR ABILITY TO
SEE THATEvERYONE IS
DIFFERENT. THEABILITY TO SEE
THAT YOU CAN BESmART INDIFFERENT WAYS. IHATE WHEN THEY
TRY TO PIGEOHOLEEvERYONE.
EvERYTHING YOU
DO HAS TO BE THISOR THAT.”JAcKETBy adamKimmeL, BUTToN-
DowN shIrTByrrL, 501JEANs By
Levi’s, ANDBooTs BymetroPoLitan
view.
GrooMINGNoTEs: LAvENDEr hAIr
crèMEBy KusCo-murPhy. wATEr
wAx By redKen.
sTyLIsT: BEcKs wELch
GrooMEr: GAILryAN
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“WHAT MAkES AFUCkING MAN? IDON’T kNOW. WHATMAkES ANYONE? I
DON’T THINk AmAN HAS TO BEMACHO. I THOUGHTTHAT WHEN I WAS16. SOMETIMES ISTILL FEEL LIkE I’M12. BUT I REALIzEI CAN’T JUMP ASHIGH. I CAN’T DEALWITH A HANGOvER AS EASY AS I COULDBACk INTHE DAY. BUTTHAT’S JUST LIFE,MAN. YOU GOTHROUGH IT. IDON’T kNOW IF I’M
EvER GONNAFIGURE IT OUT.”
rAIN
Do
JEA
By
sho
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