Del Toro on One Battle After Another
As Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, One Battle After Another, continues to be celebrated as one of 2025’s best films, Benicio del Toro catches up with a new profile in The Hollywood Reporter. The acclaimed actor admits that, despite the amount of talent involved in the film, he went into the project with humble expectations. However, he is definitely soaking up all the attention now, saying, “It’s an honor,” he adds. “It’s huge. But it’s very surprising. There’s something about it that makes me want to not believe it. And I’m trying to enjoy this wave.”
The Deleted Sensei Subplot
Del Toro would also speak about an aspect of the One Battle After Another script that had changed from an earlier draft. In the final film, del Toro’s Sensei character is a calm and collected helper to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson. However, in an original subplot, Sensei had aided in a double murder inside his dojo, which was to be covered up and it would set off a new chain of events. But for del Toro, it didn’t make much sense for his character.
Del Toro would break it down, “What’s my relationship with Leo until that point in the film? I teach his daughter. I shake his hand. He writes me a check. I deposit the check. That’s it.” He would add that the killing and the cover-up would add to many complications, “If I kill somebody in my dojo, that’s another movie entirely.” He expounded on the logic of it all, “It’s a lot of mess to clean, especially if you shoot someone in the head with a rifle. Now we’re going to have to clean it. We’re going to have to clean it fast. We’re going to have to get rid of the corpse.”
For del Toro, the Sensei character was seen as more like a “Latino Harriet Tubman.” He explains, “Sensei represents the helper. That human side of all of us. Innocent until proven guilty. You see someone in need, and you help.”
Anderson admitted that the sequence involving DiCaprio and del Toro frustrated him as he couldn’t make it come together until del Toro gave him the human smuggling idea. “It was constantly changing and never found its target. Until Benny suggested the ‘Latino Harriet Tubman situation,’ ” Anderson says. “That made everything fall into place.”
