Benicio Monserrat Rafael del Toro Sanchez (born February 19, 1967) is an Academy Award winning Puerto Rican actor. He grew up in Santurce, but spent his teens and attended high school in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.

Benicio del Toro in Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Traffic’.

He began to surface in small television parts during the late 1980s, playing mostly thugs and drug dealers on programmes like Miami Vice and the NBC miniseries, Drug Wars: The Camarena Story. Work in films followed, beginning with his debut in Big Top Pee-wee and as Dario in the 007 film Licence to Kill, in which 21-year-old Benicio held the distinction of being the youngest actor ever to play a Bond villain.

His career gained real momentum in 1995 with his performance in The Usual Suspects, where he stole scenes from his more seasoned costars as the mumbling, wisecracking Fred Fenster. He stood out among a top ensemble cast in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a complex dissection of the North American drug wars. As Javier Rodriguez — a Mexican border cop struggling to remain honest amid the corruption and deception of illegal drug trafficking — Benicio, who spoke most of his lines in Spanish, gave a heartfelt, multifaceted performance that dominated the film and earned him his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.