Benicio del Toro on Method Acting: I Will Do Anything for a Role Other Than ‘Kill You’
Go ahead, we dare you to make a “Sudden Move” against Benicio Del Toro.
The Oscar winner doesn’t shy away from doing the extreme onscreen, with Del Toro seeming to weigh in on the recent method acting debate. During an interview with Variety, the “French Dispatch” star revealed there is nothing he wouldn’t do for a role, albeit with one exception: “I will not kill you,” Del Toro joked. “I promise.”
The actor previously burned himself with cigarettes and put on weight for 1998’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” opposite Johnny Depp. Del Toro explained he felt the need to research and endure those experiences to fully embody the character based on Hunter S. Thompson’s famed novel.
“Getting to know the book that Hunter S. Thompson wrote, it makes a comment on America at the time,” Del Toro continued. He also traveled to Cuba to understand Che Guevara’s life for 2008 film “Che: Part One” and its subsequent sequel.
The star of upcoming detective movie “Reptile” called drug-centric films a genre unto themselves, with the subject allowing for an exploration of “all aspects of humanity: revenge, greed, love, all of it… and it can be completely exaggerated because that world can be exaggerated.”
Del Toro added, “The energy of playing someone who is consistently high, on all things, there’s an involvement there.”
Amid fellow stars slamming the merits (and practicality) of extreme method acting, “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour recently opened up about at first feeling like he had to indulge in the “nonsense” practice.
“When I was younger — it’s so embarrassing — but I remember playing that famous Scottish King,” Harbour, who played Macbeth onstage in college at Dartmouth in his early days, said. He said he remembers “being like, ‘I’m going to kill a cat’ or something: ‘I’m gonna go murder something to know what it feels like to murder.'”
Harbour assured, “I didn’t actually do it, obviously. Not only is that stuff silly, it’s dangerous, and it actually doesn’t produce good work.”
Mads Mikkelsen similarly calling method acting “insanity”, saying, “What if it’s a shit film — what do you think you achieved? Am I impressed that you didn’t drop character? You should have dropped it from the beginning! How do you prepare for a serial killer? You gonna spend two years checking it out?.”
