“Big-time flattered” is how Benicio del Toro describes the moment he received an unexpected call from filmmaker Wes Anderson about playing a painter in his 2021 ensemble piece “The French Dispatch.”
“I was almost like, ‘Wait, does he know he’s talking to me?’ Del Toro, casually dressed in a puffer jacket and a cap, says with a puzzled expression conveying his genuine shock at a Beverly Hills hotel. “Because my movies are a little bit different than his. In most of my movies, people get killed. You get hit with a bullet and you don’t get up.”
Del Toro has a reputation, one that comes from the gritty realism of the films that have defined his career (“Sicario,” his Oscar-winning turn in “Traffic”). But Anderson’s willingness to bring him into his meticulously crafted world — Del Toro calls it “theatrical”— suggested a new way forward for him.
“I was left wanting more,” Del Toro, 58, says in Spanish, remembering a desire to spend a longer time in Anderson’s manicured universe. (Even when speaking English, you can distinctly hear his Boricua accent layering the words through his instantly recognizable grungy voice.)
It was at a dinner when “The French Dispatch” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that Anderson approached Del Toro about a new project he was developing expressly for him to star in. Two years after that initial tease, Del Toro received the first 20 pages of “The Phoenician Scheme,” Anderson’s latest confection, and one of his most affecting and visually precise, which debuts at Cannes this week and hits theaters May 30.
Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, a ruthless 1950s industrialist setting out to complete an elaborate, globe-trotting plan to preserve his wealth, while enlisting his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a nun, to become his reluctant heir. With a target on his head, Korda travels the world, wheeling and dealing with other powerful individuals. But it’s Liesl’s forgiveness that he yearns for most.
“Wes’ writing had a lot of wisdom and it served the character,” Del Toro says. “But I didn’t know if it was going to be another film like ‘The French Dispatch,’ where my character ends and then another story rolls up. Little by little, I understood that it was the whole thing.”
Periodically, Anderson would check in with Del Toro as he wrote the rest of the screenplay. Then the actor would receive the next 15 pages or so. Sometimes Anderson would go back and rework segments of what he had previously sent. Slowly the full picture came together.
“I think he has a unique, magnetic, mesmerizing presence that I felt like I would like to build a movie around,” Anderson says, answering questions via voice notes sent over email. “He’s tremendously talented and interesting and, beyond that, I just wanted to work with him again.”
For Del Toro, who often turns supporting parts into the one thing you can’t forget about a film (for playing a guilt-ridden, despondent yet furious inmate in “21 Grams” he earned a second Academy Award nomination), it was a welcome anomaly — a leading role.
“It’s a hell of a gift,” Del Toro says with a deep sigh.
“Then, you know what the Greeks say, ‘May all your wishes come true.’” he adds, taking on a slightly more serious tone with a rueful grin. “It’s not just: OK, I put it on and done. I have to work at it. It demands from you time, being focused. You’re going to have to sacrifice some things. But as an actor working in this industry, you pray for a gift like Zsa-zsa and ‘The Phoenician Scheme.’ You don’t get them often.”
An unexpectedly warm presence, prone to laughing and constantly curious about the person sitting across from him — at one point he suggests I try acting just to know what it’s like — Del Toro found in Korda a character brimming with contradictions and transformation. No stranger to portraying morally complex men, including Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and controversial Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, Del Toro wasn’t scared of playing an unscrupulous businessman who’d built his fortune on exploitation.
“Every century has tycoons that have changed the world one way or the other, maybe not for the better,” he says. “We shot this movie before the climate now with everything that’s going on with the tariffs. We were interested in men like [Aristotle] Onassis, Howard Hughes or maybe William Randolph Hearst.”
The image Anderson envisioned for Del Toro in “The Phoenician Scheme” evoked the panache of Italian film producers in stylish suits and sunglasses — the likes of Dino De Laurentiis or Carlo Ponti.
“Maybe he would be one of these people who has the kind of money and brutal drive to feel empowered and qualified to make decisions that will affect vast numbers of people and move tremendous amounts of resources and change landscapes,” says Anderson.
Along with real-life tycoons, Anderson’s father-in-law, Lebanese engineer Fouad Malouf (to whom the film is dedicated), served as a key inspiration. The director describes him as a “wonderful, wise person” whose “surface was quite intimidating and forbidding.”
But what motivates a character like Korda?
“He’s playing a game and everything’s a chess piece,” Anderson says. “People are just more material for them to do what their inner compass tells them is good for the world. Usually it’s branded with their name, his or her name — it’s always a him.”
Anderson thinks it’s normal that viewers might find parallels between Korda and moguls like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, whose shadows cast so prominently over modern society.
“It’s all cyclical,” Anderson agrees. “When you take your inspiration from history, so often you find that you’re taking your inspiration from yesterday or tomorrow, so it’s never a surprise to me when we say, ‘OK, here’s how what we’re doing connects to today.’ It naturally happens and it should.”
For Del Toro, it was the optimism of Korda’s trajectory — from stone-hearted capitalist to someone seeking redemption after surviving multiple assassination attempts — that intrigued him.
“He’s a human being, and human beings make mistakes,” Del Toro says, “but I think he’s a better person at the end. He loses everything, but I think he’s happier. Any character that you get as an actor that has that big of a change is exciting to try to achieve.”
Appreciative of Anderson’s gift, Del Toro squeezed the role of all its humorous self-seriousness laced with grounded emotions. There’s a heightened, deadpan tone to everyone’s acting in an Anderson picture, and while the actor immersed himself, there’s no lack of truth to what Korda is feeling.
Interspersed throughout the story are black-and-white “mystical visions,” as Anderson calls them, in which Korda sees himself in heaven atoning for his sins and even dialoguing with God. (No spoiler here for which Anderson regular plays the Almighty.) Though Korda is an atheist, Del Toro thinks of these dreamlike moments as the character’s attempt at mending his own wounds.
Raised in faith, Del Toro attended Catholic school as a kid, but his relationship with religion remains ambivalent. “I’ve had my journey through it, where I just turned my back on it and then came around, but I do consider myself Catholic and I believe in God,” he says.
Then there are the more technical demands of playing the lead in a painstakingly constructed Wes Anderson film. To channel his concentration for the next day’s scenes, Del Toro would often skip interacting with the rest of the cast over meals. Working on his lines was of pivotal importance.
“The dialogue is put together like a clockwork that if you take something out, you lose the spark of it, because his writing is painted with a thin brush,” Del Toro says. “It’s precise.”
At one point, Del Toro wondered if they could cut part of a monologue where Korda talks about his upbringing with a father who was a bully. But then he realized those instances are what make the character feel fully formed.
“I just felt like, ‘Do we need that?’ But yeah, you need it because we’re analyzing this ruthless businessman who’s got to have an arc” he says. “It’s nice to have these moments.”
Anderson remembers that after his own parents divorced, he “went off the rails” as a 10-year-old. His teacher’s solution to the problems he was causing in her classroom was to make a deal with him that appealed to his interests.
“For every 10 school days in a row that I was good, she would let me put on a play that I would write, because she knew I liked to write these little plays and I wanted to perform them,” he recalls. “That became my motivation, and I did all these little plays in fourth grade. And I do think that probably had something to do with me making films.”
For his part, Del Toro had to recite a speech dressed as a policeman at his kindergarten graduation.
“I remember looking into the audience and seeing my family,” he says, smiling, “and I have this clear vision of seeing a cousin of mine sitting right there and how excited and nervous I was at the same time.”
It was by hearing from a teacher that one could train to become an actor without being an innate performer that pushed him to pursue the craft. Getting a scholarship to the Stella Adler Conservatory validated his decision. Del Toro believes he’s evolved since his early acting days.
“When I was younger I was a little bit more cynical, but I do think I’m different than when I was 28,” he offers. That’s the age he was when his breakthrough in “The Usual Suspects” hit screens.
I ask him if he thinks the change was positive. “I’d like to think for the better,” he says with a laugh, “but someone else has to judge that.” Even if he’s humble in the moment, in hindsight Del Toro knows he was right about sticking to his ideological guns as a young man despite his family being worried about his prospects.
“When you are an actor and you come to this town and you go out on auditions, you’re going to get all kinds of things that are going to make you really insecure, from the name to the way you look and the way you sound,” he says. “Being a Latino also puts you a little bit coming-from-behind, in a way.”
He’s countered that with shape-shifting flexibility, committing to characters from multiple ethnicities and backgrounds. Anderson thinks of Korda as a role that the legendary Mexican-born actor Anthony Quinn of “Viva Zapata!” and “Lust for Life” could have played, a comparison that makes Del Toro stumble through his words until he is able to articulate his feelings.
“That’s a compliment,” he says. “When you said it, the first thing I thought was, ‘Do I see myself like that?’ Yeah, I mean, I’ve done the same thing in a way. If he wanted to only play Mexican characters, he would have had to wait years to work again. Anthony Quinn brought life and power to minorities — he played everything.”
Later this year, Del Toro will be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” The two briefly collaborated on 2014’s “Inherent Vice,” in which Del Toro had a bit part. Now he gets to act with Leonardo DiCaprio in most of his scenes.
“I’m really lucky to have worked with the two Andersons,” Del Toro says. “I went from Babelsberg, Germany, straight to El Paso for 10 days, so here we are, completely different story, but I’m very excited to see how people will react to that film.”
Though he’s happy to talk about PTA, who he says he’s been friends with for a long time, he won’t say much else about the movie, but he’s ecstatic to have a bigger part this time around. Seems like old collaborators are coming around to explore Del Toro’s acting arsenal more fully.
Del Toro’s to-do list includes working with Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. And it’s not difficult to see the actor fit right into the blood-splattered crime tales that characterize those directors.
“There are filmmakers that I would like to work with, but it’s hard for me to ask, ‘Can I be in one of your movies?’ I’ve never been that guy,” Del Toro says.
If the phone rings, however, he’ll commit. Might be good to bring a tailor-written leading role.