Benicio Del Toro’s Career Shifts Into a Higher Gear

Headlining an action film franchise and a Showtime mini-series, the actor faces new challenges.

Benicio Del Toro
Actor Benicio del Toro attends the New York screening of "Sicario: Day Of The Soldado" on June 18, 2018 in New York City. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
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Benicio Del Toro has always identified with athletes: The rigorous training, the full-body commitment, and the mixture between ability and dumb luck. Del Toro, who has appeared in notable movies like The Usual Suspects, Traffic, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and a pair of Avengers films, has been a strikingly high-impact player, averaging an unusually high ratio of memorable moments to minutes on screen. But now Del Toro is entering a new stage of his career with a Showtime mini series, Escape at Dannemora, and starring the action feature Sicario: Day of the Soldado. With all this extra screen time, Del Toro has now become more of a marathoner than a sprinter.

At 51, Del Toro, who was born in Puerto Rico, is one of only a few Latinos to headline a film franchise released by Hollywood. He injects details from his personal life into the characters he portrays, making them more attainable to audiences. That stutter his character had in The Last Jedi? That was a nod to his father, reports the New York Times. But how will the ,ing-time character actor handle all this new exposure, and the heady expectations that come with it?

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