There is a good amount of crossover between the two films—both center around father-daughter relationships, both follow political actors (Del Toro’s wealthy robber baron in the former, a group of radical activists in the latter) being targeted by deep state agents, and both trade heavily in the themes and style of novelist Thomas Pynchon, with OBAA being loosely adapted from his novel Vineland (even as the surreal slapstick in Phoenician Scheme feels closer to the comedy within its pages).
But it is Del Toro’s heavy presence that binds the films to one another. Together, they represent everything that makes the 58-year-old actor, who hails from Puerto Rico, one of the most singular screen talents of our day, someone who vacillates between leading man and character actor more naturally than almost any of his peers.
Del Toro got his start on television, playing drug dealers and crooks (par for the course for Latino actors) on shows like Miami Vice. He hilariously made his big screen debut in 1988 as sideshow freak Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Big Top Pee Wee. The next year, he appeared in the James Bond film License to Kill as sadistic thug Dario. While not quite as memorable as other Bond henchmen like Odd Job or Jaws, it was still a big role for the young actor (especially as his death scene is one of the more gruesome bits across any of the Bonds), who expected it would catapult him to stardom.
Things didn’t quite work out that way, with Del Toro having to live off his paycheck for that role while he waited nearly a year to work again. He did eventually start getting parts in memorable films, including The Indian Runner, Fearless, Swimming with Sharks, and China Moon. He finally broke out in 1995 as career criminal Fenster in The Usual Suspects, for which his ingenious and hilarious marble-mouthed performance won him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male Actor.
He quickly became one of the most in demand character actors around, working with the likes of Abel Ferrara, Julian Schabel, and Tony Scott. His attempted transition into a romantic lead via the 1997 Alicia Silverstone vehicle Excess Baggage didn’t take, but he became an instant cult icon the next year when he put on 40 pounds to play the deranged Chicano lawyer Dr. Gonzo in Terry Gilliam’s batshit insane adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-fueled novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Legit movie stardom came quickly after that. In 2000, he played one of the dual leads in the underrated thriller The Way of the Gun, the directorial debut of Usual Suspects writer and once and future Mission: Impossible helmer Christopher McQuarrie. That movie didn’t make much waves at the time, but his other crime drama of the year, Steven Soderbergh’s border-set narco saga Traffic, did. Del Toro’s soulful performance as a morally torn Mexican federale nabbed him a number of year-end awards, including the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Traffic turned Del Toro into a full-on A-lister, although over the next two decades, he would split his time between leading and supporting roles. He’d continue to work with major auteurs—Soderbergh several more times, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, William Friedkin, Denis Villeneuve, and eventually both of the Andersons—as well appear in two of the biggest franchises in cinema history, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars.
Del Toro’s ability to play both big and small roles, in both big and small movies, is part of his unique screen presence. In One Battle, Sensei Sergio advises another character to “get back on defense.” That line was initially given to Del Toro by PTA during the filming of Inherent Vice (2014), their first collaboration. Per Del Toro, Anderson directed him to not “get bogged down on things..just keep looking, being…think about the next play.”
It’s surprising that this direction should come from Anderson, given that it describes Del Toro’s acting style from the beginning. His performances feel guarded in a way that lends them mystery, even as we never get the sense that he’s holding anything back. It’s this cagey quality that makes me believe Del Toro would have been a movie star any point throughout cinema history; his hangdog handsomeness and deadpan delivery would have been perfect for the noirs and screwball comedies Tinsel Town’s Golden Age; his continental suaveness would have made him in demand for the global arthouse films of the ‘60s; and his raw intensity and dark charisma would have been right at home in the New Hollywood rebellion of the ‘70s.
(This, of course, doesn’t account for the difficulties that Latino performers have always and still face when trying to get a foothold in the industry—something Del Toro has spoken about at length—although it should be noted that Del Toro is the third Puerto Rican to win an Oscar for acting, following in the footsteps of Jose Ferrer and Rita Moreno. Also, prior to our oversensitive modern times, there was an unspoken standing agreement between certain darker-featured actors that allowed them to act across various ethnicities, something Del Toro has taken full advantage of, having played all manner of Latino, as well as Jewish, Italian, Native American, and non-specific European.)
Which brings us to now. Although Del Toro has worked steadily the last several years—his turns as a very different, much more vicious Mexican drug enforcement agent in the Sicario films being particularly big for him—his one-two punch this year feels like something of return to full strength for the actor. And while The Phoenician Scheme didn’t land with audiences or critics as much as it deserved, Del Toro’s performance as the industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda, whose increasingly frequent close calls with death and reconnecting with his estranged daughter set him questioning his ruthless ways and eventually seeking redemption, will undoubtedly go down as one of his very best performances, arguably his best lead performance.
The Pheonecian Scheme puts into sharp relief Del Toro’s penchant for both gravitas and deadpan comedy. His heavy-lidded eyes convey a deep well of pathos, even when he’s playing an outright buffoon. It was that same combination that got people to pay attention to him in The Usual Suspects, and he’s only honed his skills as the years have piled up on him, transforming him from a lanky heartthrob—it’s been oft-remarked how much young Del Toro resembled a Latino Brad Pitt—into a bearish silver fox.
But for whatever plaudits he deserved but didn’t quite get with The Pheonecian Scheme, he has more than earned them for One Battle. As the benevolent but rascally Sensei Sergio, a local karate instructor and leader of an underground railroad for migrants in Northern California, he is the moral center of the film and the platonic ideal of leftist politics put into action. He is also the coolest dude to appear on screen in forever and gets the most iconic piece of dialogue—“A few small beers”, which Del Toro ad-libbed—of the last several years. His role is not the biggest in the movie, in either screen time or ferocity, but it has connected so deeply with audiences that Del Toro is now the frontrunner for another Best Supporting Actor statue.
(Interestingly, his biggest competition is his One Battle co-star and friend Sean Penn. It would be fitting to see these two go head-to-head during awards season given their long history: one of Del Toro’s earliest movie roles was in Penn’s 1991 directorial debut The Indian Runner. Penn would cast him a few years later in his third directorial outing, 2001’s The Pledge. They would then star together in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2003’s drama 21 Grams, and, in one of the great What If? projects, almost appeared as two of the Three Stooges, alongside Jim Carrey, in the Farrelly Brothers’ initial attempt to bring that project to screens. Finally, in 2008, when Penn was winning multiple best actor awards for Milk, he publicly criticized the lack of nominations for Del Toro’s turn as Che Guevara in Soderbergh’s two-part biopic of the Cuban revolutionary.)
Ultimately, the awards and plaudits don’t matter. The performances are what will last, and you can bet your bottom dollar that when all is said and done, Sensei Sergio’s scenes in One Battle will be at the center of any career retrospectives Del Toro gets. Said retrospective will show that no actor was ever better at playing defense.
