<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Way back when, he spied some graffiti in backstreet Los Angeles -- SAME SAME, it read -- and he secreted those two simple words deep into his memory. Some kid, maybe white, maybe black, maybe Mexican, maybe smarter than his life would lead you to believe, a dreamer, had taken a can of spray paint and tagged a wall with his wry little riff on the world. The kid, even if he was a dreamer, probably never thought for a moment that Benicio Del Toro -- the guy won an Oscar, man, flip you for real -- would see his handiwork and stash it away for future application.  The future finally came last fall, when Del Toro was lying on his bed in a Vancouver hotel room, set to begin filming a movie called Things We Lost in the Fire, which will be released in late October. He was about to play Jerry, a guy whose struggle to quit heroin mirrors his friend Audrey&amp;#039;s (played by Halle Berry) struggle to recover from her husband&amp;#039;s death -- how to kick love to the curb is the essence of it. So on that last anxious night before action, he riffled through his mental files for inspiration and desire, his great, confused collection of imaginary index cards. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s a poem he&amp;#039;s read or a painting he&amp;#039;s seen that provides the necessary boost; sometimes it&amp;#039;s how the guy sitting next to him at the bar asks for his drink; sometimes he pockets someone&amp;#039;s entire life like a pack of matches and takes it out when he needs a spark. This time around, though, it was just a piece of graffiti that floated to the top of the stack after all these years: SAME SAME. When he talks about it, when he talks about anything, he sounds as if he&amp;#039;s fucked up, but it&amp;#039;s more that he&amp;#039;s choking on the clutter in his attic. &amp;quot;For me, it just, you know, said something about being levelheaded, not taking those ups and downs. I thought it said something about, you know, like, how to stay in that middle. Like, too happy would trigger him one way, too sad would trigger him another way, too much money would trigger him one way, not enough money would trigger him another way.&amp;quot; Struck, Del Toro summoned himself to move. He jumped off his bed, called the hotel&amp;#039;s front desk, and asked where he could get a T-shirt made. Turned out there was a little place across the street -- open till midnight. (&amp;quot;I was like, Are you kidding me?&amp;quot;) He dashed over and had SAME SAME printed in thick block letters on a plain white T-shirt. It became very important to him that Jerry wear the T-shirt in Things We Lost in the Fire. It made perfect sense to Del Toro that this would be so.  Except the film&amp;#039;s director, a spirited Danish woman named Susanne Bier, did not like the T-shirt. She didn&amp;#039;t get it. Maybe it was the language barrier; probably it was that Del Toro is flat-out hard to get. Either way, she resisted, and the Bull dug in his hooves, back and forth like that, until Bier finally relented, and today we see Jerry jogging in this curious T-shirt, spun out of some L.A. kid&amp;#039;s graffiti and a Vancouver souvenir shop. But that wasn&amp;#039;t the end of it. Del Toro&amp;#039;s known as Benny the Troublemaker not for nothing. There are other scenes, several of them, in which only he knows he&amp;#039;s wearing the T-shirt, a silent rebellion. He turned it inside out, wore it under blankets and bathrobes, even sneaked it onto a shelf in the background. For him, SAME SAME had become his mission. &amp;quot;Because at that point, I am that guy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I become the book.&amp;quot; Del Toro has picked up so many ideas for how to become the book, they sometimes go &amp;quot;dormant,&amp;quot; he says, for lack of an outlet. But maybe because of that, when at last they come to life, they usually take on a life of their own. His biggest idea yet will come to life the day after tomorrow. Ask him to talk about it and he says, &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s not much to talk about.&amp;quot; Then he talks about it for nearly two hours. Its origins reside in Mexico City, circa 1988. Del Toro was bored, mulling around the set of Licence to Kill, the James Bond flick that followed on the heels of his first big-screen appearance as Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Big Top Pee-wee. (In case you were wondering, Del Toro regrets nothing: &amp;quot;I finish a movie, I let it go,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Otherwise you&amp;#039;ll go crazy.&amp;quot;) He wandered out of the sun and into a bookstore, where a display caught his eye: a black-and-white photograph of a square-shouldered man, bearded and dark eyed, with a tangle of curly hair falling from his beret. The photo was surrounded by the man&amp;#039;s many books. Del Toro picked up one of them at random. That was how he was introduced to the story of Ernesto &amp;quot;Che&amp;quot; Guevara de la Serna, through a collection of his letters.   Now, nearly two decades later, Del Toro will fly tomorrow evening to Spain to embody Che, which is to say that today in New York, he looks like a homeless man. &amp;quot;It makes airports tougher,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a different line for the dangerous-looking characters. Girls don&amp;#039;t check you out as much, and guys look down. But it&amp;#039;s funny the looks that I get from street people. Suddenly, I&amp;#039;m their brother.&amp;quot; Even when he&amp;#039;s groomed, Del Toro&amp;#039;s lid resembles a lion&amp;#039;s mane or a carpet of sea grass. This afternoon, his hair is long and unruly at its ends, hiding his ears the way it usually advances on his forehead. More of it is stuffed under a foam-front, mesh-backed hat adorned with a giant logo, BP. (&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s from Japan. I don&amp;#039;t know what it means. It means ballplayer to me.&amp;quot;) He has a beard, too, thick and wispy at the same time, like a B-movie kung-fu-master&amp;#039;s beard -- like Che&amp;#039;s beard -- with strands of gray that will need to be dyed. He pulls on it a lot, curling it under his chin. He&amp;#039;s jittery like that. The way Fred Fenster, his memorable breakout character from The Usual Suspects, danced back around the corner when the cops picked him up, all elbows and knees? That&amp;#039;s how Benicio Del Toro really walks. The jumpiness, combined with the cover of hair growth, obscures a little how gaunt he is right now. He needed to drop weight to be convincing as a jungle revolutionary, and his brown jacket hangs on his shoulders over a loose-fitting Guns N&amp;#039; Roses T-shirt, Use Your Illusion I. Dark jeans cinched at the waist and vintage sneakers complete the monied, hungry hobo look. &amp;quot;You going to write this guy walked in trying to look like Johnny Depp?&amp;quot; he says.  There is some Depp hiding in there, that&amp;#039;s true enough, but Del Toro isn&amp;#039;t pretty like Depp, or at least he isn&amp;#039;t anymore. Looking at his early work, the smart gamble would have had him becoming a matinee idol. But he&amp;#039;s too sleepless to keep up appearances. He has developed a supporting actor&amp;#039;s face, swollen in spots and thin in others, like a boxer&amp;#039;s, late career. These plastic days, his ascent to leading-man status is one of modern Hollywood&amp;#039;s minor miracles. It helps that he&amp;#039;s a really good actor. All those ideas of his haven&amp;#039;t hurt, either. Take Traffic, for instance, for which he won his Oscar. If you close your eyes and picture Benicio Del Toro in that movie, chances are good that you&amp;#039;ll picture him in a swimming pool, his hair slicked back, talking to a pair of DEA agents, naming his price: &amp;quot;Everybody likes baseball.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#039;s a strong scene, made that much stronger by the setting. Like Del Toro&amp;#039;s eyes, the water conveys anxiety and danger with every catch of light, no guns or bugs. The script, however, had called for that meeting to take place in a hotel room. It was only during his read through with director Steven Soderbergh that Del Toro raised an objection, blowing the dust off another one of his index cards. &amp;quot;I remember telling Steven, &amp;#039;I don&amp;#039;t think I go there, man. I don&amp;#039;t think I go to a hotel room with strangers.&amp;#039; And he said, &amp;#039;Where would you go?&amp;#039; So I said, &amp;#039;Somewhere public, a pool, something like that.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Del Toro says, &amp;quot;All credit to Steven, he just snapped his fingers.&amp;quot; But in that moment, the actor made the director&amp;#039;s movie better before he had spoken a single line.  &amp;quot;Then I&amp;#039;m standing in the water going, Why the fuck did I say that? Now I&amp;#039;m standing in a pool.&amp;quot; Take standing in a pool, multiply it by some large number, and you&amp;#039;ll get this Che thing. Del Toro has staked the last couple years of his life on the project, not to mention the next year or so of production and the future health of his career. &amp;quot;Whenever I think about it, I bite my knuckles. I pull my hair out. I can&amp;#039;t walk, man. My back hurts.&amp;quot; So you&amp;#039;re nervous about it? &amp;quot;Am I nervous? Yeah. Am I nervous? Yeah. Am I nervous? Yeah.&amp;quot; He gets stuck on repeat like that every now and then, like a record that&amp;#039;s been scratched. It&amp;#039;s hard to tell if it&amp;#039;s because he doesn&amp;#039;t know what to say next or if it&amp;#039;s because he&amp;#039;s too scared to say what&amp;#039;s next. Right about now, it sounds like fear. Although he&amp;#039;s drinking water and water only today -- and later, working on his gauntness, eating a cheeseburger without the bun, no sides -- Del Toro just spent three days boozing in Canc\u02D9n, steeling himself for his departure. It felt like the last moments before drowning. The airport in Newark, New Jersey, will be the last Del Toro sees of us, and we see of him, until he&amp;#039;s given permission to return home and cut his hair and shave his beard and try to let go of Che because otherwise he&amp;#039;ll go crazy. He&amp;#039;s hoping to be home by Thanksgiving, but that might be wishful thinking. These historical epics almost always turn into nightmares. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been like carrying a big heavy piano up the Empire State Building,&amp;quot; he says, the bags under his eyes providing witness. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve thought a lot about the day I&amp;#039;ll get to drop it off.&amp;quot;  From that idle pit stop in a bookstore in Mexico City and through his usual periods of dormancy, three research trips to Cuba (&amp;quot;all legal&amp;quot;), the acquisition and subsequent loss of the rights to Jon Lee Anderson&amp;#039;s seminal biography, the churning through bunches of writers and at least one director (Terrence Malick), struggles to raise money and find the hook for the story, fears of death by The Motorcycle Diaries, battles fought and won to film in Spanish, the prolonged gestation of not one but two separate films (presently titled The Argentine and Guerrilla) under the direction of his old pal Soderbergh, and now, finally, headlong into these, the last fretful hours of bracing before it all comes to something or collapses under its own weight...Del Toro has been grayed by Che, the way parents are aged by their children. This will be the sort of aria that defines him, that confirms him as one of film&amp;#039;s great men, or that ruins him. And all of this, every last scrap of it, he knows. He knows that the day after tomorrow, he&amp;#039;ll be in the very deepest end of the pool. &amp;quot;Fuck,&amp;quot; he says, pulling on his beard harder than he has been all day. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t fucking fuck around.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s all too heavy. He needs a distraction. Music&amp;#039;s good to talk about. Del Toro loves music. Describing the evolution of Che, he employs the Rolling Stones as a metaphor: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re trying not to do Che&amp;#039;s greatest hits. If you&amp;#039;re doing a greatest hits of the Rolling Stones, you probably open up with &amp;#039;Satisfaction&amp;#039; and you finish the first side of the album with &amp;#039;Sympathy for the Devil,&amp;#039; and then you open side two with &amp;#039;Gimme Shelter&amp;#039; and you close with &amp;#039;Start Me Up.&amp;#039; Well, we&amp;#039;re trying to start with &amp;#039;Blue Turns to Grey&amp;#039; and finish with &amp;#039;Stray Cat Blues,&amp;#039; and then start the second side with &amp;#039;Luxury&amp;#039; and finish it with &amp;#039;Infamy,&amp;#039; something like that.&amp;quot; Ask him about his other movies and he usually begins by telling you the albums he listened to, hidden away in his trailer, trying to sustain whatever feelings he had already stolen from somewhere or someone else. Things We Lost in the Fire is a dark movie with lots of rain and crying in it, so his personal mix tape leaned toward midnight. He went to see the National in concert (&amp;quot;They were great, they were great, they were great,&amp;quot; he chants), and that stoked his listening to Alligator, broken up by Bob Dylan&amp;#039;s Modern Times and R.E.M.&amp;#039;s Monster. He was in Memphis for 21 Grams -- which earned him his second Oscar nomination -- so he listened to Elvis Presley, the Sun Records stuff, and Johnny Cash, mostly American IV: The Man Comes Around, mostly Cash&amp;#039;s cover of &amp;quot;Hurt.&amp;quot; Del Toro&amp;#039;s days before Traffic were dominated by Los Lobos, to get him into the Mexican groove, but he was careful to counter that group&amp;#039;s pep with acoustic Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It&amp;#039;s as if he&amp;#039;s some kind of alchemist: a bit of her, them, and you, every mood a potion. He&amp;#039;s already thinking of his next soundtrack. He&amp;#039;s already looking past Che as though he can&amp;#039;t look directly at him anymore. Tonight, to take his mind off what might come, Del Toro&amp;#039;s going to crash at his brother&amp;#039;s place -- his brother is a doctor here in New York -- and watch a couple of Charlie Chaplin films he picked up from Kim&amp;#039;s Video. A little while ago, he went on a monster-movie binge: the original King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon. He was talking to his manager about them, just chitchat, when the tables were turned and something was stolen from him. &amp;quot;My manager just looked at me and said, &amp;#039;Dude, I&amp;#039;m calling Universal -- I&amp;#039;ll talk to you later!&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  That phone call has since turned into a remake of The Wolf Man. If Del Toro thought he was hairy now... &amp;quot;Right now, that&amp;#039;s a mirage,&amp;quot; he says. But it&amp;#039;s a good mirage, the survivor&amp;#039;s reward, the oasis that awaits. Del Toro heads outside. It&amp;#039;s beautiful and warm out, but it&amp;#039;s Saturday and the streets are quiet. Not far away, a black car idles, waiting to take him to his brother&amp;#039;s, the same black car that will ferry him to Newark, which will launch him into Spain. Even if the people on the sidewalk could see him through the tinted windows, nobody would bother looking twice at Del Toro, just another homeless man in a limo. But he&amp;#039;s looking at them. Years ago, he was an acting student here, and he spent most of his free time in Times Square, before it became a shopping mall. It was a factory then -- dim and smoky, with peep shows, needles on the sidewalk, fat heavyweights working out behind greasy glass -- and Del Toro would stand in the middle of it all and watch. Today, he remembers how the pimps would touch their whores with a threatening affection, and how the junkies would jitterbug away from a score, and how the cops could only shake their heads, decent but defeated. He watched especially this one guy, who walked a little like him, all elbows and knees, but who talked funny, high-pitched and indistinct. That guy, after Del Toro added a pinch of punch-drunk Joe Frazier, that&amp;#039;s the guy who became Fenster in The Usual Suspects -- &amp;quot;I had to do something, man, I died on page forty-two&amp;quot; -- the way the junkies became Jerry in Things We Lost in the Fire, the way the cops became Javier in Traffic, and the way Benicio Del Toro will become Che Guevara the day after tomorrow.  This story is part of our second annual register of emerging ideas, trends, discoveries, products, people, and obscene gestures you should know about before everyone else does. &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; Read Previous * [Back to Esquire 100] * Read Next &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3377/benicio1007/>