He's played a recovering drug addict (21 Grams) and one not so recovering at all (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). He starred as Pablo Escobar in last year's Escobar: Paradise Lost. And the critical pinnacle of his career came in his Oscar-winning performance as an honest Mexico police officer in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. In Denis Villeneuve's muscular, grim thriller Sicario, Del Toro finds himself back on the other side of the border, playing a mysterious mercenary joined with a CIA task force covertly pursing a Mexican drug lord. These stories are out there in the newspapers.' 'I don't know how it comes about, but all I can say is I'm an actor in this time,' says del Toro. Sicario, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, has already drawn raves for Del Toro's terse gravitas as a shadowy man known only as Alejandro. He says little but has a weighty presence. 'Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything we do,' he warns Emily Blunt's less-experienced FBI agent. 'I've been in movies where I think it's going to work, and it doesn't. 'And I tell you this one was one of those that I didn't know.' I've been in movies where I thought it wasn't going to work and it did,' Del Toro said in a recent interview. Villeneuve, the Quebecois director of Prisoners, was more confident. 'He knows a lot about that world being involved in movies and coming back with people who were involved in drug wars,' says Villeneuve. 'For me, he was a source of information.'Ĭinematographer Roger Deakins likens the weary-eyed Del Toro to Robert Mitchum. Villeneuve would often cut Del Toro's dialogue, stripping the part down as he realised the actor did more with less. I just cut 90-95 percent of his dialogue. 'He's someone who's very radical about authenticity. It has to come from a deep emotional understanding.' When he doesn't feel something, he cannot act. That Del Toro, whose family moved to Pennsylvania when he was 12 years old, has frequently found - or been found by - drug-war tales is somewhat surprising to him. But it's an issue he says he feels passionately about. 'I've done many characters that live in that world, the drug wars and the drug world, but this one had a different angle.' 'I've done my best not to repeat myself,' he says.

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