After joining Wes Anderson‘s list of frequent collaborators, Benicio del Toro might have unwillingly found himself on another list.
The Oscar winner, who stars in Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, revealed that the film’s script got him flagged for TSA inspection during a flight, due to some suspicious scenes in the screenplay.
“I had the script in my carryon, I’m in Boston and I’m flying to LA,” he recalled on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “And for some reason, I had my computer in there, and I didn’t take it out, so the TSA people, they just said, ‘Hey, we need to check your bag.’ ‘Sure.’ He opens the bag, he looks into it—and I take my scripts and I make the headings bigger, so I can get to it really quick.”
Del Toro noted, “The opening scene is ‘Interior Airplane: Bomb’. The second scene is ‘Interior Cockpit: Eject the Pilot’ and the third scene is ‘Crash.’”
“The guy, he’s reading it. I go, ‘It’s a film script,’” he continued. “And he looks at me and goes, [holding up his finger], and he closes the thing and walks out. Five TSA guys come over and they hover around the script, and they’re looking at it and looking at it. And then finally, the supervisor showed up and he walked in and he looked at me, and I think he recognized me, maybe from Sicario or Traffic, and he just sat there and looked at it and they let me go.”
Despite the hiccup in his travel plans, the actor understood the TSA agent was just doing his job. “But, you know what? I give that guy a thumbs up because he was paying attention,” he said.
Del Toro and Meyers then imagined how the conversation would have gone if the TSA let him go and something bad happened. “It was a checklist!” the actor joked.
Marking Anderson’s 13th feature, The Phoenician Scheme is now in theaters, starring del Toro as wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, who becomes the target of a deadly pursuit after appointing his nun daughter, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), as the sole heir to his estate.
