He’s played heroes (Che), art-world hep cats (Basquiat), the insane (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), the principled (Traffic), the re-habbed (21 Grams). But Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro began his career playing thugs on shows like Miami Vice and made his name as Fred Fenster, the profane, mumble-mouthed thief of The Usual Suspects. If the buzz is true, all of them will pale in comparison to the 45-year-old’s villain in Oliver Stone’s bloody, based-on-true-crimes thriller Savages (opening July 6). As Lado, Del Toro plays the ruthless, machete-wielding enforcer of a cartel who, as Taylor Kitsch recently told GQ,"goes around matter-of-factly decapitating people." Here’s how all that nasty started.
**GQ: What scared you when you were a kid? **
**Benicio Del Toro: **Teachers. The dark. Being alone. Being somewhere alone.
GQ: Was there a villain that frightened you the most?
**Benicio Del Toro: **Monster movies with Bela Lugosi. But it was Robert Mitchum in the original Cape Fear that scared me the most because he was very real. Mitchum was like someone I knew and he overpowered the good guy—Gregory Peck—until the end.
GQ: Do you have a favorite fictional villain?
**Benicio Del Toro: **From literature it would have to be Dracula. In movies there is always Jack Nicholson’s Johnny in The Shining. Robert Mitchum, Christopher Walken in _Close Range, _Pacino in Scarface. It’s difficult to pick just one.
GQ: What was it about Nicholson in The Shining that you loved?
**Benicio Del Toro: **The way he crumbled into madness was really spooky to watch. His smile can be warm but also extremely cold, depending on how he decides to use it. There are different kind of villains. There’s the friendly, funny villains, like Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There’s the vicious villain like Joe Pesci in GoodFellas. The list is impossibly long: Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron—Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers is pretty crazy. And then there’s Jack Nicholson, who is total craziness, a psychopath.
GQ: Ever draw on your own fears when you play a role?
**Benicio Del Toro: **Not really. It’s usually the story and imagination.
GQ: Was there ever a villain you rooted for or admired?
**Benicio Del Toro: **I guess I rooted for the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I rooted for Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs in a weird way. The more complicated they are, the more you kind of forgive bad guys for the stuff they do—also the ones who make you laugh when they’re doing something wrong.
**GQ: You’ve been playing villains since you started acting. When did you figure out that you could play the bad guy? **
**Benicio Del Toro: **The first time I ever thought about acting. I don’t know, it might have something to do with the shape of my head, but it happened quickly. The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy. I think a good guy’s role has its perimeter marked, in a way.
GQ: How much of Lado, the character you play in your next film, Savages, was written on the page and how much did you create?
**Benicio Del Toro: **We explore things that might not have been in the book the film is based on [Don Winslow’s Savages: A Novel], but for the most part, the character was solidly on the page of the book and script. The book is fiction, but it’s also based on actual facts so you’re looking at bad guys from real life.
**GQ: How important are costumes for you, for getting into a role? **
**Benicio Del Toro: ** With Savages, Lado’s cowboy boots helped. They make you taller. Then there’s the makeup—they put some scars on your face, you look into the mirror, and it’s not really you. You kind of hold onto that and say,"Okay, now I’m bad."
GQ: Do you think most villains see themselves as bad guys?
**Benicio Del Toro: **Most of them, yeah, but Lado also had an upbringing that was completely terrible. He’s managed to gather some power and to become successful so he feels like the end justify the means. He’s a little like, _Somebody else is worse than me. _You use an excuse but that doesn’t mean you’re not a horrible person.
GQ: Do you think most of villains are born bad, or something makes them bad?
**Benicio Del Toro: **You might get some serial killers who are born with a chip missing, but for the most part I don’t think anyone is born bad. Especially now that I have a daughter, I just find it impossible to believe that. You look at a helpless baby, and how bad can it be?
**GQ: Has it been hard to shake off any of your bad guys? **
**Benicio Del Toro: **All the time. That’s why I get my hotel room with rubber walls [laughs]. No, not really. It’s work. You might take some things. Attitude makes a bad guy so maybe some of the attitude sticks for a bit.
GQ: How evil, percentage-wise, would you say you are in real life?
**Benicio Del Toro: **47.6998 percent. I’m a bad guy. It fluctuates all the time, though. Right now I’m 15.7699.
**GQ: Only 15 percent? **
And that’s nothing if you think about it. Nature is much worse.
GQ: Do you think movie villains have changed much?
**Benicio Del Toro: **All the possibilities of bad guys have been done. There are some vicious, really modern bad guys in silent films. What’s changed is that bad guys started to get away with it. That probably started in the seventies and eighties with Freddy Kruger; he would kill you and get away with it and no one could catch him—he’d be back on the sequel. Villains used to always die in the end. Even the monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula—you’d kill them with a stake. Now the nightmare guy comes back.