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Listen to this articleIn Mexico, SICARIO means hitman.
In the lawless border area stretching between the U.S. and Mexico, an idealistic FBI agent [Emily Blunt] is enlisted by an elite government task force official [Josh Brolin] to aid in the escalating war against drugs.
Led by an enigmatic consultant with a questionable past [Benicio Del Toro], the team sets out on a clandestine journey forcing Kate to question everything that she believes in order to survive.
“It’s a movie about choices,” says Del Toro, who dives into one of his most conflicted roles as the equal parts vengeful and tender hit man Alejandro. “It’s tough to say whether any character in Sicario is truly good or bad. Do the means justify the ends? What happens when go into a situation where you want to kill one guy and you kill 20 innocent people? You got the bad guy, but at what cost?”
The complex heart of Sicario is the film’s most unsettling character: Alejandro, who is at once a former courageous prosecutor grieving for his murdered family, Kate’s sympathetic guardian and a sicario in his own right, willing to cross any line to bring down the cartels who tore apart his life.
Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan imagined Benicio Del Toro taking the role even as he was writing. Fittingly, the charismatic Puerto Rican-born actor previously had won an Oscar® for his indelible portrait of a different side of the drug war as a street-smart Tijuana policeman in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic.
He garnered another nomination as a born-again ex-con in Alejandro Gonzalez Inárritu’s 21 Grams, and has given a range of memorable performances, from joining the pulp universe of Sin City to playing Che Guevara to his recent turn as a 1960s lawyer in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.
Del Toro says that complexity gripped him. The question that hit him hardest was whether Alejandro can truly live with the things he has done, or if he has accepted that the price he must pay is forever being an outsider to society.
“Alejandro used to be a prosecutor, and then his family was killed in the drug wars, so from those events, he became an assassin of drug lords of sorts. But is he a bad guy? I don’t know,” muses the actor. “I wouldn’t say he made bad choices to get where he is, circumstances controlled by other human beings forced him to be who he is. He has been given this role of hit man for the US government, so he lives in this bloody, dark world. He is willing to do it for his own reasons, but can he ever go back into society after what he has become?”
Adds producer Basil Iwanyk: “Benicio is one of those classic actors who tells you, `Give me fewer lines. I want to play this in my eyes. I want to play this in how I nod my head or how I look away.’ At times, his portrait of Alejandro is very quiet and internal but then he’ll suddenly be powerful and magnetic. He’s really the heart and soul of this movie.”
Alejandro’s impenetrable exterior only seems to soften in the presence of Kate. The two are drawn together, if just for a fleeting moment, then wrenched apart in the course of the story. “In a strange, subtle way, Kate starts falling for Alejandro and he starts falling for her. It is very carefully played by both actors,” says Iwanyk. “As Kate discovers how broken this man is, and how that is manifested in more violence than she can fathom, our heart is broken for him and for ourselves, because we were invested in this man. In Benicio’s performance, you realize Alejandro was once a good person, but because his heart was shattered he went to this dark place, and he may never recover.”
