There haven't been many stars who have managed to combine coolness with great acting. Brando. Bogart. Newman. Sinatra, arguably. Nowadays there's . . . well, Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H Macy are certainly two of the finest actors working today, but they're hardly the epitome of cool. There's George Clooney, perhaps - the Clooney of Out of Sight, Three Kings and O Brother Where Art Thou?, not of Batman & Robin. There's the Brad Pitt of Fight Club. Sean Penn and Johnny Depp in pretty much everything. And then there's Benicio Del Toro, who won a Golden Globe and has been nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor in Steven Soderbergh's new movie, Traffic.
His very name seems to inspire reverence from his colleagues.
For Brad Pitt, Del Toro's co-star in Guy Ritchie's gangster movie Snatch, "he is about as good as they come. You'll see that in Traffic. He is amazing."
"He's very cool," agrees Taye Diggs, who worked alongside him in Christopher McQuarrie's modern Western The Way of the Gun. "I was watching him work, just stealing from him, waiting for the opportunity to play a character like that, where I can use his subtleties and what he does with his eyes and his furrowed brow. He's something else."
Indeed. While many will remember Del Toro mainly for his hilarious performance as the mumbling, mercurial Latino hood in The Usual Suspects, the Puerto Rican-born actor's star has been rising steadily, with a series of show-stealing character parts in films such as Basquiat and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, culminating in his role as a desperately honest small-town Mexican cop in Traffic.
A lengthy, labyrinthine drama adapted from the BBC TV series Traffik, it follows the drugs trade across the US-Mexico border and its effects on both communities. Traffic also stars Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle and Dennis Quaid, and, typically for Soderbergh, there's not one bad performance in it. But Del Toro manages to out-act them all, mostly in Spanish.
"My character is trying to do the right thing, and little by little comes to realise everything is corrupted and he's got to dance with situations," begins Del Toro over lunch in a Beverly Hills restaurant. Dressed in a baggy Lon Chaney Jr T-shirt, dark jeans and a black-and-white cap jammed down over unruly black hair, he looks more like a truck driver than a movie star. "He starts to get a little corrupted but fights it. He wants to do the right thing. That's what's unique. Usually the Latin guy is the bad guy. And working with Steven is quite an experience.
"He's the coolest director I've ever met. He allows your creativity to flourish. He encourages."
Born in Puerto Rico in 1967, Del Toro moved to Pennsylvania with his lawyer father when he was 12, after the death of his mother.
"One of the reasons moving for me wasn't so traumatic was that I wanted to see the Stones' Tattoo You tour," says the actor, who had grown up listening to the Beatles, the Stones and the Who. Filming Snatch, he says, allowed him to catch up on the British music scene. "I rediscovered the Jam. I knew them a bit from high school but I was more of a Clash guy."
After a year studying business at the University of California, he went to drama school in New York, before training with Method master Stella Adler in Los Angeles. He made his film debut as Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Randal Kleiser's Big Top Pee-Wee, and popped up in the Bond movie The Living Daylights as well as on TV playing various drug lords. Later films included Sean Penn's directorial debut The Indian Runner, Peter Weir's underrated Fearless, and George Huang's Hollywood satire Swimming With Sharks. But it wasn't until Bryan Singer cast him as the unintelligible Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects that Hollywood really noticed him. Not that Del Toro thought Singer's movie would amount to much. "When I finished my last day of shooting I was driving home and I went, `What the f**k have I done, doing this f**king stupid character in this stupid f**king movie? It's over.' We didn't know. Honestly, I read the script one time and it didn't make any goddamn . . . the names, this and that, but it worked pretty good, yeah."
The Usual Suspects won Oscars for writer Christopher McQuarrie and for Kevin Spacey as best supporting actor, and suddenly people started taking more notice of this quirky-looking, quirky-sounding guy. There were roles in The Funeral, by Abel Ferrara, and in The Fan, where he got stabbed by a psychotic Robert De Niro, before he landed his first lead as a car thief opposite Alicia Silverstone in Marco Brambilla's kidnap comedy Excess Baggage - though the less said about that the better. Not so Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which saw him play Gonzo to Johnny Depp's Hunter S. Thompson. That movie was a trip in more ways than one, but proved a bit too odd for most audiences. "I'm a master of movies that have life in video," he says. "They come out, they don't work and eventually in video everyone goes, `Oh yeah, it's good'. Like Fear and Loathing, which has picked up a crowd."
Del Toro's next starring role is in Basic, directed by Lee Tamahori, but he wants to be more than an actor. "I've been writing a little bit," he says. "I've got a couple of things on the shelf."
Del Toro has already written and directed a short film, Submission, starring Matthew McConaughey, and eventually he wants to try his hand at a feature. If he wasn't working, he'd like to hang out on the set of Soderbergh's next movie, Ocean's Eleven, and learn from the best. "I did ask Steven if I could come. I want to learn how fast he goes. I'd like to learn about the lenses and the camera. And he's so unpretentious. I really like his attitude."
Traffic opens in Ireland on March 23rd.
The Oscars are announced on March 25th