He’s totally consumed by his characters

NEW YORK —  If you ask Benicio Del Toro what he brought to his new movie, what changes he made to “Things We Lost in the Fire” -- what bits he added in, or dialogue he tweaked -- he shrugs and says, “We would have to open the first version of the script. Right now, the movie is what it is. It’s a strange feeling -- What did I bring in? You get confused.” He doesn’t remember, in other words.

But Susanne Bier does. “I’ll give you a couple of examples of his magic,” the Danish director says.

She starts with the first scene he’s in as Jerry Sunborne, lawyer-turned-junkie. It’s at the wake for his best friend from childhood, played by David Duchovny, who was shot on the street trying to help a woman being beaten by her husband. Del Toro’s character shows up with unkempt hair, a rumpled suit, tie askew and the sleepy eyes that are the actor’s trademark. He lights a smoke and offers one to another man at the wake, a neighbor of his dead friend. The neighbor takes a few puffs and tosses the cigarette aside.

That’s when Del Toro reaches down, uses his finger to extinguish the butt and puts it in his pocket. That’s nowhere in Script 1, 2 -- any script -- that “very little gesture telling a whole thing about the character,” Bier says. “He just did that.”

She moves ahead to one of the last scenes, long after Del Toro’s Jerry has been taken in, as a human reclamation project, by his friend’s widow, played by Halle Berry, whose character is trying to raise two children -- a girl, 10, and boy, 6 -- through their collective grief. It’s time for Jerry to head out from the protective womb of the family’s garage. He must say goodbye to the little girl, who doesn’t want him to go and locks herself in her room. The script called for Del Toro to talk to her through the door, Bier recalls, but he suggested that they slash his dialogue.

They did leave in an “I love you,” but Del Toro proposed that his other lines be replaced by a gesture, him slipping a note under the girl’s door. The audience did not even need to see the letter or hear it read. Less is more. Suggestion over overtness. “It replaced a whole lot of words and actually did something which was much more affectionate in a very simple way,” says the director.

Of course, as a film is about to be released -- “Things We Lost in the Fire” hits screens Friday -- directors are supposed to gush about their stars, whether they have Oscars or not. But the 47-year-old director buys some credibility for her insistence that this one is a “true genius” by fessing up that it was not always easy to collaborate with an actor who “came to the set every morning having rewritten every scene he was doing.”

Bier, who was making her first film in English, figures it was an 85/15 proposition: 85% of his ideas were inspirations, and keepers, the rest not quite. “Yeah, she says, “great artists are bound to at some times be difficult.”

TO research the role, Del Toro consulted a medical authority on addiction, sat in on recovery groups and had ex-addicts tell him how heroin withdrawal was “like the worst case of flu you’ve ever had.” But most “didn’t want to turn the page,” to go into much more detail, he says, so he turned to William S. Burroughs’ novel “Junkie,” which did. He invented a scenario for why a man who grew up with Duchovny’s upper-middle-class character and became a lawyer might have ended up shooting up in an addict’s alley, envisioning this guy from a country-club family that looked good from the outside but wasn’t and who didn’t feel normal until he took drugs.

But when Del Toro tried injecting the lingo of addicts into one monologue -- using “liquid handcuffs” for methadone, for instance -- Bier feared audiences wouldn’t understand, and “we had this discussion where I kind of felt I was a boring school mistress,” the director recalls. That idea of his thus joined the 15% that never made it on screen, as did his explanation for how Jerry threw away his career. That time, Bier insisted on the less-is-more approach.

And asked whether he still was good at his job, he replied, “Who cares anyway?”

Like many filmgoers -- and the Academy Award voters -- Bier had been astounded by Del Toro’s performance as a Mexican border cop in “Traffic,” and not only for his most obvious quality as an actor, his intensity. Bier thought he was funny, most notably in the scene in which he wants to meet with American authorities, the feds -- just not somewhere they can tape him, so these three guys wind up in a swimming pool. His demeanor was not comedian-funny, as she saw it, but see-the-world-as-absurd funny.

There also was his quiet confidence -- he seemed to be one of those rare actors who felt no compulsion to throttle audiences to get their attention. He got them to come to him.

“You know, he’s immensely secretive,” Bier sums it up, “and I think you want to open that door. You want to know what that secret is, even if it doesn’t exist.”

When you ask Del Toro about that ability -- to get the audience to come to him -- he replies, “I guess.” If that’s true, he speculates, it may have to do with truly being in the moment -- not a simple thing, however many actors talk about it -- and not playing to that audience, or the camera. He’s even willing to turn your back to it. “I guess you could say I’m bringing the audience in because they can’t see what I’m doing,” he says.

“I try the same thing with girls,” the 40-year-old Puerto Rico-born heartthrob adds. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work.”

HE’S sporting a beard these days for his marathon reunion with “Traffic” director Steven Soderbergh to produce two Spanish-language features (“The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”) based on the diaries of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the medical student turned South American revolutionary. It’s a risky, “definitely off-to-the-side venture, Del Toro acknowledges, in today’s climate of political noise machines, some of which may not appreciate biopics about a close ally of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Taking a short break from that project, which has begun location work in Puerto Rico and will film also in Spain and Mexico, Del Toro was in New York to talk up “Things We Lost in the Fire” but also to squeeze in a visit with his brother, a prominent oncologist in the city. Both their father and mother were lawyers, providing a solid middle-class upbringing that didn’t spare Del Toro from being cast in a very different light after he took up acting while a college student in San Diego. He found himself playing “every position, pretty much” in the drug trades. “I’ve played the guy who sells it, I’ve played the guy who does it. . . . and the guy who tries to stop it, the cop. . . . Maybe because of the dark looks, you know, the sleepy eyes, the circles under my eyes.”

While ethnic casting is the fate of many Latino actors, Bier believes another quality is a factor in Del Toro’s case. “I mean, he’s got an obvious dark side, which lends himself to that kind of part,” she says, and Del Toro certainly will get to explore his dark side in his project after the “Che” epics -- a remake of “The Wolf Man.”

For now, though, it’s “Things We Lost in the Fire,” which despite its European director, hand-held camera work and artsy touches -- from non-linear storytelling to close-ups of eyeballs -- is being promoted as a mass-appeal studio (Paramount) release, with advertising emphasizing its two glamorous Oscar-winning leads and the slogan “Hope comes with letting go.”

That’s arguably more suited to self-help bestsellers and daytime TV talkers than the subtlety of most any Del Toro portrayal, but you have to put up with a little of that stuff when you make movies -- and maybe with a moment on screen that stretches credibility.

“The joke is,” says Del Toro, “I go to people and say, ‘Hey, I’m in a movie with Halle Berry,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, and I slept with her. You gotta go check it out. I sleep with her.’ ”

Yes, he does get invited into bed with Ms. Berry, whose character desperately misses her dead husband and needs a man to hold her and stroke, just as he did . . . her ear.

You could make the case that Del Toro’s Jerry might think of his dead friend and his two lovely kids and thus lay uncomfortably beside one of the most beautiful women in the world and really want to get out of there, to get away.

Now it’s Del Toro’s turn to fess up, “It’s not realistic, man.”

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