48. Also last year, Del Toro played Pablo Escobar in Escobar: Paradise Lost. Yet again, Del Toro both is and isn’t the star. His character’s name is in the title, and he’s the driving force, and he’s freaking Pablo Escobar — but Paradise Lost also plays the Last King of Scotland card, casting Josh Hutcherson as the white-dude avatar stuck in a milieu of lawlessness and drugs and violence and every other south-of-the-border trope you can come up with.
49. Somewhere in his quiet post-Che period, Del Toro was the hot rumor for the villain role in Star Trek Into Darkness. At the time, everyone generally agreed that he was up for the part of Khan. This made sense, sort of. The part of Khan was created by Ricardo Montalban, a Hispanic actor born in Mexico (but partially raised in the U.S.) And if you squint a bit, Khan’s outfit in Wrath of Khan looks uncannily modeled along the same lines as Del Toro’s white-god phase in Christopher Columbus. Of course, Khan himself was supposed to be vaguely Indian, possibly Sikh, generally some undefinable non-white — which, again, would have made sense for Del Toro. Instead they went with Benedict Cumberbatch.