Benicio Del Toro hasn’t gone everywhere, but he’s now visibly everywhere.
Of course, it has something to do with it being awards season, and the 2026 Oscar nominee has been attending one show after another, including Best Actor with his 14-year-old daughter Delilah, after hustling for a supporting role as a stealth activist karate instructor in One Battle After Another.
In fact, one wonders just how far del Toro had to reach out of his comfort zone to play Sergio St. Carlos, the cool-as-a-cucumber teacher who gives Leonardo DiCaprio’s overzealous father Bob Ferguson a big helping hand in the search for his missing daughter Willa, played by Chase Infinity.
Probably not that far.
Not only because Paul Thomas Anderson wrote del Toro’s role, but the Puerto Rican star then made some important changes that ultimately set the tone for the rest of the film.
“My character was born out of killing someone in the dojo,” del Toro told the Los Angeles Times’ Envelope Oscar Actor Roundtable in December. “So I asked (PTA), ‘Okay, even if we kill this guy in the dojo, we’re not going to take Leo anywhere! We’re going to have to dispose of the body, and we’re going to have to clean out the dojo or set it on fire.'”
At the end of the day, ‘Why am I doing that?’ he explained. “So from there it evolved into, ‘We didn’t kill anyone.'”
