Benicio del Toro has featured in adaptations of Hunter S. Thompson‘s work, won an Academy Award and worked with some of the all-time greats. But his biggest regret still haunts him and is one he will seemingly never live down. The veteran performer who appeared in One Battle After Another indicated that his decision to turn down a film starring Bob Dylan is a choice he will feel devastated by for the rest of his career.
del Toro would opt not to feature in Masked and Anonymous, the Dylan-starring film which followed a fictionalised version of the veteran songwriter. John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, and Val Kilmer each appeared in the film, which released in 2003. It was a time when Dylan’s stock as a performer had been revived thanks to the Grammy Award-winning album, Time Out of Mind, and its 2001 follow-up, Love and Theft.
Despite the poor reviews Masked and Anonymous received at the time of its release, del Toro still wishes he had been a part of the production. He had been offered a role in the show but turned it down, not knowing that Dylan was set to be the star. He said: “One time, I turned down a role, and then I found out that Bob Dylan was in the movie and the scenes were with him. I would’ve loved to shake his hand, to meet him, to be able to say that I met him.”
Masked and Anonymous is unfortunately not fondly remembered by viewers. Even Dylan has distanced himself from the project and suggested he could never have produced the vision he had in mind for the film appropriately. He said in 2012: “Whatever vision I had for that movie, that never could’ve carried to the screen.”
He went on to suggest that Cate Blanchett, who portrayed Dylan in I’m Not There, would have been a better match for the role. Dylan added: “Everybody was really good in it. Everybody except me. I had no business being in it, to tell you the truth.”
Despite its failure to capture the hearts of audiences and critics, Masked and Anonymous serves as Dylan’s attempt at deconstructing the image he still has to this day. Cult Following’s feature on the film suggests that the outcome of the film and Dylan’s subsequent image survival is part of the point to Masked and Anonymous.
It reads: “Masked and Anonymous is a well-built movie because it feels so fractured. But so too are the autobiographies, the personalised pieces of work which Dylan denies are at all to do with him. He can say what he likes, art is an infliction of the soul on another and there is no way around that. Dylan is not as uncaring as Jack Fate is as he watches those with a cause gunned down by those with another. It is the lack of shock which benefits his character most of all. How else can he react when he has seen it all before?
“Different times, different arguments, but the same weary outcome. Presenting himself as a man without the answers meant clambering onto a bus and travelling through the world as he always had, but this time with a morose feel to his words. There is no answer to the struggle and conflict. Dylan has resigned himself to the same weary indifference many of us have – but the embers of passion are still buried there, used to kindle a storm of reflection as often as he can bear it.“
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