Benicio Del Toro Profile

30 December 2008

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Benicio Del Toro was perhaps best known for his role as Fred Fenster in Bryan Singer’s 1995 movie The Usual Suspects up until the last couple of years. With a string his high quality performances Del Toro has proved himself one of Hollywood’s greatest, yet still, underrated talents.

Since his Academy Awards win for Best Supporting Actor in 1998 for his role as Javier Rodriguez in Traffic he has seen his career soar.

There was another Best Supporting Actor nod from the academy in 2001 for his turn in 21 Grams alongside Sean Penn and Naomi Watts before a change of style and pace in Sin City.

But 2008 has been a quietish year for the actor with only one noticeable release; it is however a role that could see him bag a best Actor Oscar nomination, as Ernesto Che Guevara.

Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won Best Actor for his performance, Steven Soderbergh’s epic, split into two movies; Guerilla and The Argentine, follows Che from the revolution in Bolivia to his demise.

On November 26, 1956, Fidel Castro sails to Cuba with eighty rebels. One of those rebels is Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine doctor who shares a common goal with Fidel Castro - to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Che proves indispensable as a fighter, and quickly grasps the art of guerrilla warfare. As he throws himself into the struggle, Che is embraced by his comrades and the Cuban people.

The film tracks Che's rise in the Cuban Revolution, from doctor to commander to revolutionary hero.

Into 2009 and it’s a complete change for the actor as he takes on the role of Lawrence "Larry" Stewart Talbot in The Wolfman, a remake of the 1941 classic.

Lawrence Talbot, a haunted nobleman, is lured back to his family estate after his brother vanishes. Reunited with his estranged father, Talbot sets out to find his brother... and discovers a horrifying destiny for himself.

Talbot's childhood ended the night his mother died. After he left the sleepy Victorian hamlet of Blackmoor, he spent decades recovering and trying to forget. But when his brother's fiancée, Gwen Conliffe, tracks him down to help find her missing love, Talbot returns home to join the search.

He learns that something with brute strength and insatiable bloodlust has been killing the villagers, and that a suspicious Scotland Yard inspector named Aberline has come to investigate

The Argentine is released 2nd January

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

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