Toro, Toro, Toro!

Benicio Del Toro is the kind of actor who can say more with a single look than many can with a well-crafted line.

He does it amid a never-ending fusillade of bullets in his new film, The Way Of The Gun. He does it even better over two cups of black coffee and a cigarette while describing the movie's serpentine route to the screen. 'I try not to act, that's all I really do when I'm working,' he says, deadpan, downplaying a performance that critics have already compared to James Coburn's work in The Magnificent Seven.

Set in an unnamed Southwestern town on the Mexican border, The Way Of The Gun follows the travails of Del Toro and co-star Ryan Phillippe (Cruel Intentions), a pair of cold-blooded drifters who stumble upon the criminal opportunity of a lifetime. Abducting a surrogate mother-to-be (Juliette Lewis) and demanding a king's ransom from the family for whom she's carrying the child, the outlaws instead find themselves dealing with more than they bargained for: a head-to-head run-in with the Mob. Avoiding the cookie-cutter trappings typically found in the genre, The Way Of The Gun instead follows a complex web of desperate hit men drawn one by one into the fray - Nicky Katt, Taye Diggs, Scott Wilson and an unnerving James Caan - each motivated by their own greed and agenda. But despite the violent scenario (and largely strong performances), the film's most powerful weaponry is its uncanny ability to make the extraordinary seem frighteningly commonplace.

'You're just trying to be in the moment,' explains Del Toro, describing his favourite scene, a pivotal moment in which James Caan's veteran mobster offers his petty hood a final chance to back out of the ill-conceived kidnapping which will most likely end in disaster for all. 'You just don't do anything in a scene like that, that's the trick,' says Del Toro, suddenly animated. 'Let the man drive the car - that's the way it is with Jimmy Caan. He acts. You react. And it's easy, because Jimmy is that good.'

So much for pretence. So much for the 'craft'. Though Del Toro has certainly had his share of both, having studied under a Stella Adler Conservatory scholarship in New York and the Actor's Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Mercifully though, these experiences have done little to water down one of independent cinema's most arresting figures.

A jobbing actor since the late Eighties and a veteran of some 20-odd films, the 33-year-old Del Toro has nevertheless remained something of a chameleon. 'I'm taking over from Anthony Quinn,' he quips - a familiar name if not always a recognisable face on screen. Del Toro is perhaps best known for his 1995 breakthrough film, The Usual Suspects, in which he played the incomprehensible con-man Fred Fenster, repeatedly stealing scenes from better-known co-stars Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri and Kevin Spacey. In considering the film (which took Oscar honours for Best Screenplay that year and introduced Del Toro to mainstream audiences), critics seemingly had but one complaint - the brevity of the actor's screen-time. As Newsweek magazine put it, 'Couldn't the bad guys have whacked Stephen Baldwin instead.'

His films since - The Fan with Robert De Niro, Terry Gilliam's Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas and Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (for which he received his second Independent Spirit Award) - have had more limited impact, even if they served to reinforce a critical consensus that Del Toro is a man to be watched, ultimately drawing comparisons to Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando for his efforts. They're the kind of accolades which today leave Del Toro rolling his eyes to the back of his head.

'Benicio tells the truth, that's what's special about him,' says Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual Suspects screenplay and reunited with Del Toro to mark his directorial debut with The Way Of The Gun. 'As an actor he's obsessed with telling the truth...it's as if he's got some kind of internal mechanism that renders him incapable of lying. That's his greatest strength.' 'He's the one guy everyone wants to work with, and I mean everyone,' says Gun co-star Ryan Phillippe. 'He helped me so much along the way, just watching and working with him in each scene.'

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Del Toro says he was a troublemaker as a teen - 'If I went back to school now, maybe I'd actually learn something' - who stumbled upon an acting career later in life. Moving to San Diego to study law, he instead fell in love with the theatre and made his small-screen debut in a 1987 episode of Miami Vice. He proceeded to bide his time with bit parts in Big Top Pee-Wee (1988), the James Bond movie Licence To Kill (1989) and Sean Penn's 1991 directorial debut, The Indian Runner, before making his mark with The Usual Suspects. 'It's funny, the one actor I didn't want for that film was Benicio Del Toro,' says McQuarrie who, four years later, would write The Way Of The Gun with both the actor specifically in mind and at Del Toro's own instigation. Such, it seems, is his admiration. 'Benicio was the one who actually insisted that I make a crime film again, something I had been avoiding for a number of years,' explains McQuarrie who, despite his Oscar-winning success, found it impossible to secure a job directing anything other than a crime movie in Hollywood. Indeed, McQuarrie was at the point of abandoning film-making altogether, when a conversation with Del Toro at a local cafe gave him pause for thought. 'He told me then and there, "If you want to say what you're trying to say, you're going to have to make the film they want you to make." That's where The Way Of The Gun really came from.' 'We both agreed that we had never seen a kidnapping movie that was in any way unusual - that was the starting point,' explains Del Toro. 'And I instinctively knew that Chris couldn't help but come up with something unusual!'

'Unusual' is perhaps the best word to describe The Way Of The Gun. Ostensibly a noir-meets-Western thriller with a paper-thin plot line, McQuarrie's film instead builds complexity and interest as it unfolds in fragments until the background story of each character is slowly exposed and interconnected. It is a world where men wrestle as much with their own decisions as with their most violent enemies and, arguably, represents the actor's finest performance in years.