“I think, also, these movies can make money. You’ve got movies like ‘Public Enemy,’ or ‘The Roaring Twenties,’ ‘Scarface,’ the original one, they were borrowing from their time,” Del Toro says. “Gangster movies, when they started, they were borrowing from Prohibition and the gangsters of their time. It captures the current zeitgeist, but Del Toro traces the film to Hollywood roots going back over eight decades. The thriller is graphic in its sudden explosions of violence and imagery of mutilated bodies hanging from bridges. “Sicario” is much of this moment with its representation of border communities as almost being under occupation by both the cartels and the often militarized forces fighting against them.
“If I see something that I just wouldn’t believe, or find is pushed or explained too much, then I will bring those concerns to the director.”
“I’m always thinking about how I can make myself useful to story,” he says. At the same time, he never stopped thinking about the character and the story and of the ways he could help Villeneuve achieve his vision. Over time, he learned to separate man from character, so he never had to live Alejandro’s darkness. When he was starting out, the actor says he would sometimes get so into his characters that he had trouble letting them go when the camera stopped rolling. “There was something easy to understand about the fact that he had been hurt, and he was suffering, and was in this quest of vengeance for someone who did something wrong to him.” “Alejandro’s kind of easy to understand,” Del Toro says. He’s useful to someone like Matt, who has no qualms about fighting the drug wars by any means necessary. Dealt a bad hand by life, his sense of mission, however horrifying, keeps him going. When straight-arrow FBI agent Kate (Emily Blunt) joins their team, she is at once repulsed by the methods the two men use to get their desired results and intrigued by Alejandro, a troubled and troubling man. Then there is “Sicario’s” Alejandro, a former prosecutor who is now a contractor with the CIA, employing a lethal set of skills as he works alongside Matt ( Josh Brolin) in the U.S.-Mexico border region.
He won a best supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of a Mexican cop caught between both sides of the drug war in Steven Soderbergh’s epic 2000 drama “Traffic.” “Escobar: Paradise Lost” was released to mixed reviews and a limited theatrical run, but not for lack of effort on Del Toro’s part as he utterly sinks into the skin of the drug lord, transforming the criminal myth into someone utterly human. The battles among the drug cartels and the never-ending war against the flow of illicit narcotics are an ongoing international catastrophe, but one that has afforded Del Toro some of the most striking roles of his nearly 30-year career.