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Article: Building Character; Actor Benicio del Toro Specializes in Putting the Meat on a Role
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- March 15, 2003
- Author:
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By most accounts, actor Benicio Del Toro is a perfectionist. He
badgers directors and screenwriters with questions. He's not shy
about suggesting scene changes. For him, characters, dialogue and
plot must be credible. In Hollywood, he is regarded as a prodigiously
talented actor -- he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role
in "Traffic" -- and as an intense artist with unusually high
standards.
He is also known as a mumbler.
Del Toro, 36, first gained notice in 1995 as the marble-mouthed
hood Fred Fenster in "The Usual Suspects." Since then, he has played
a range of entrancingly eccentric characters. Not all of them mumble,
but many do, and their word-swallowing serves to draw you in ...