It’s not as if Benicio del Toro went anywhere, but now he’s noticeably everywhere.
Of course, that has something to do with it being awards season and the 2026 Oscar nominee has been attending one show after another—including the Actor Awards with his 14-year-old daughter Delilah—following his hoot of a supporting turn as a stealth-activist karate instructor in One Battle After Another.
One wonders, in fact, just how far outside his comfort zone Del Toro had to reach to play cool-as-a-cucumber sensei Sergio St. Carlos, who gives Leonardo DiCaprio‘s frantic dad Bob Ferguson a major assist in finding his missing daughter Willa, played by Chase Infiniti.
Probably not far.
And not only because Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the part for Del Toro, after which the Puerto Rican star made some key changes that ended up setting the tone for the rest of the movie.
“My character was introduced by killing someone in my dojo,” Del Toro said in December on the Los Angeles Times‘ The Envelope Oscar Actors Roundtable. “So I asked [PTA], ‘OK, if I kill this guy in the dojo, I’m not going to drive Leo anywhere! We have to get rid of the body and we’re going to have to clean the dojo, or set it on fire.”
Ultimately, “Why am I doing that?” he explained. “So, from there, it evolved into, ‘We’re not killing anybody.'”
