The Beast Within

Benicio Del Toro is the kind of actor who can do a lot with a little (his Oscar-winning performance as principled but pragmatic cop Javier Rodriguez in Traffic is a good example) or a lot with, well, a lot (his mumbly, jittery turn as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects kinda put him on the map). And in Oliver Stone's sunburnt film noir Savages, Del Toro gets to do a bit of both.

As Lado, the sadistic right-hand man to Salma Hayek's drug-cartel baroness Elena, he's out to make life miserable for California weed entrepreneurs Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson, their shared girlfriend Blake Lively and their shady DEA contact John Travolta.

Whether he's wiping Lively's spit off his face with Lively's own hair or quietly intimidating Travolta by commandeering the man's sandwich, Lado is a powerful presence. And Del Toro makes him vividly nasty without chewing the scenery.

“You always live with that fear that you are going to go over the top and ham it up in a bad way – well, hamming it up in any way is probably not good for an actor – but you especially have that fear when you do a bigger-than-life character like this one,” he says.

“You have a good meter in the other actors, though – they either directly or indirectly kept me in check, and Oliver also kept me in check. But he also told me when I could go further. And there are a couple of things in there where they just happened right on the spot. Ideas came up that weren't necessarily scripted – that's just collaboration. Oliver might have thrown ideas at me that I took and ran with, or another actor – like John Travolta in our scene together – may make a comment or suggestion that helps set the tempo.”

In creating Lado, Del Toro made good use of Don Winslow's novel to get an idea of the character's background and motivations. “And there are many little stories that I know about or that I've read over the years that help make whatever happens in Savages believable,” he adds. “But I used my imagination on this thing a little bit more than on perhaps any other character.”

The closest comparison he can make is to his loathsome Sin City character Jackie Boy, a corrupt cop who menaced women before coming to a nasty end.

“Lado could be related to that guy, closer than any other character I've done if I was going to draw a line connecting all of them,” says Del Toro.

“They're both bullies, they're both greedy, they both stop at nothing... but at the end of the day the idea was to not give this guy any dignity. Me and Oliver saw eye to eye on that. We both wanted him to be a worm, and I think we accomplished that.

“You know, there's this scene with Salma where she slaps me and yells at me, and it creates this thing where it's like, 'Oh, maybe Lado's not that bad.' But you know that story about the woman who picks up a wounded snake, takes it home, feeds it and cares for it and then one day the snake bites her, right? The woman says, 'What did you do that for? I brought you back from the dead, I took care of you,' and the snake says 'But you knew I was a snake'.”