THE first time Benicio Del Toro ever heard the name Che Guevara, he was 12. Living in his native Puerto Rico, he had just got hold of the Rolling Stones' album Emotional Rescue, and contained in the song 'Indian Girl' was the immortal line "My father he ain't no Che Guevara". Three decades later, the 41-year-old star has come full circle, playing the iconic revolutionary in Steven Soderbergh's ambitious two-part film Che.
Already the recipient of the Best Actor award in Cannes for his work, Del Toro looks a shoo-in for an Oscar nod next year –assuming Academy members are willing to sit through the double bill's gruelling four-hour length.
When we meet, Del Toro has
just returned from the Toronto Film Festival, where Academy Award campaigns are traditionally launched. "That Oscars and awards stuff is good for the business side of showbusiness," he says. Dressed in a black suit, he appears like an ambassador for the film, one he's been attached to for more than a decade. Clean shaven, with his bushy black hair neatly swept back, even his sleepy brown eyes look alert – a considerable change from the last time I met him, for Sin City, when he looked like he'd spent 48 hours partying.
Having won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a compromised narcotics cop in Soderbergh's Traffic, and received a second nomination for his preacher in 21 Grams, Del Toro admits "it would mean something to me" if he won again. "It helps your instincts," he says. "Instincts are fragile. And it's good to reward instincts."
This is the most complete performance of Del Toro's career. Burrowing under the skin of Che, even showing his crippling asthma, it's a down-and-dirty portrayal of the man beneath the beret.
With the two films dealing with distinct segments of Che's life – Part One traces the run-up to the revolution in Cuba; Part Two resumes several years later when he took flight to Bolivia – Del Toro makes no apologies for the bum-numbing running time. "We wanted to get in and spend time with him, so it's got to be a bit long," he says.
While Che's early-Sixties period of power in Havana is not shown, in a black-and-white section in Part One we glimpse him addressing the UN in 1964. "We call that the 'spotlight' moment. That's the moment of him being a star. Arguably, the most powerful he ever got was going into the belly of the beast, and saying what was wrong, loud and clear, in front of everyone."
Yet Del Toro finds it hard to pin down just what Che means to him. "It's many things," he says. "He's a human hero. I don't think that many people that carry his image know exactly what he stood for. You have to make a big distinction. He was a part of the Sixties, what was going on then. If you take the Sixties away from him, he looked very different. But he was a human being, and it's important to make sure he has all the dimensions of that. You can do him as a hero or as an evil person, but there's no doubt in my mind that I have much respect for him, his family and what he stood for."
Calling him "a defender of the real people", Del Toro says part of the reason he took on the role was because a few years after listening to that Stones song, while in school and college, Che "had been kept behind curtains in my history classes". Still, if Del Toro's performance does anything, it's to demythologise the man whose face has probably shifted more T-shirts than Madonna and Michael Jackson combined. Even Del Toro owns one. "Eventually I got one," he says, almost embarrassed. "And since I started doing this movie, I have 600 T-shirts. Every time they see something with Che, friends will say: 'Hey, man! You look like this dude!'"
Painting Che as a ruthless revolutionary rather than an idealistic icon, the actor is unrepentant. "He believed in the death penalty. Jesus, every president of the United States believes in the death penalty. So if he's bad then every president, including Abraham Lincoln, is bad. I don't want to be hypocritical, so we have to look at the other side." While Del Toro underlines that he's no supporter of capital punishment himself, he calls Che "a Jesus of some sort – though he says: 'I won't turn the other cheek'. That's the difference there. But Jesus was a rebel who went into the temple and ripped everything around."
A lifelong rebel himself, it's easy to see why Del Toro is drawn to Che as a character. Raised with his older brother in Santurce, a district of San Juan in Puerto Rico, his lawyer father was a strict disciplinarian, and they often clashed after Del Toro was branded a troublemaker at school. He was educated as a Catholic at the Academy of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where he says the nuns and priests "gave me hell at times", though his life there hasn't evidently dented his spiritual beliefs. "I'm not religious but I believe in God," he says.
Del Toro lost his mother to hepatitis when he was nine. He says the times he made her laugh during her long illness were probably his first acting efforts. "When things like that happen at such an early age, you accept them as fact," he says. "It's like they are part of the tree of life." After his father remarried two years later, Del Toro did not get on with his stepmother, and was eventually allowed to study in the US, at a boarding school in Pennsylvania.
He didn't know a great deal of English and grew up quickly there. "I enjoyed being alone," he says. "I also played basketball a lot, and I was quite competitive at it so I immediately made friends. Then I met a girl so I was covered. I was lucky."
Expected to follow his family into the legal profession, Del Toro decided to buck tradition. He enrolled in a business course at the University of California in San Diego, but soon moved to New York to study acting.
While becoming the youngest ever actor to play a James Bond villain in 1989's Licence To Kill aged just 21, it took him another six years to fully establish himself as the near-incoherent criminal in Bryan Singer's superlative heist movie The Usual Suspects. Working with Singer set the pattern to come. "My career has been daring in some ways," he says. "I've been in projects that have been hard to make, independent movies. Most of my movies have been independent."
With a CV that has seen him work with mavericks such as Terry Gilliam (Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas), Abel Ferrara (The Funeral) and William Friedkin (The Hunted), he's no orthodox A-list star.
Yet come April we will see Del Toro in his highest-profile studio film yet. Co-starring Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt, The Wolf Man is a big-budget update of the 1941 original starring Lon Chaney Jr. "With all due respect to Lon Chaney Jr, I had the guts to say: 'I want to remake your classic'," says Del Toro. "It's not going to be better – just different."
Quite what playing a hairy horror will do for his love life is anyone's guess. An eligible bachelor, he's dated Italian actresses Valeria Golino and Chiara Mastroianni, been attached in the press to his Excess Baggage co-star Alicia Silverstone, and was rumoured to have enjoyed a close encounter with Scarlett Johansson in a lift. While rumours last summer paired him with recently divorced actress Catherine Keener, it's little wonder he remains coy on the topic when I ask if he's currently seeing anyone. "I'd like to do a romantic lead," he says. "I'd like to be dressed up in a suit and get the girl at the end of the movie."
One thing he is keen to do is a third Che film, dealing with his time in Africa. "Nothing is going to be done unless Steven makes a move. I will only do it with Steven, or with Steven's blessing. I hope he feels the same way."
Che: Part One opens January 1. Che: Part Two opens on February 20
