Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme expanded to a wide release over the weekend, earning #6 at the box office. Not bad for an independent, meticulously-crafted confection of a little film! Benicio del Toro leads the strong ensemble piece. He appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers last week, and boy, Benicio had a whopper of a story prepared. You see, Benicio likes to print out his scripts; to have something to hold and something to write notes on. A man after my own heart. Benicio also likes to adjust the font size so that the scene headers are printed larger, making them easier to find. So Benicio was traveling at some point around the time the movie was filming, and for some reason he forgot to take his laptop out of his bag when going through airport security. TSA agents swooped in to check his bag, and I’ll hand it off now to Benicio to describe what happened when those agents stumbled upon his Phoenician Scheme script sitting under the laptop:

During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers on June 4, he [del Toro] told Seth Meyers about the incident, explaining that he had a large-print script for The Phoenician Scheme that had TSA agents on edge and for a good reason.

He explained, “The opening scene is ‘Interior Airplane: Bomb.” But that’s not even the worst of it.

“The second scene is ‘Interior Cockpit: Eject the Pilot’ and the third scene is ‘Crash,’” del Toro continued.

So when TSA agents saw the script for the Wes Anderson film, they were justifiably concerned about who del Toro was and what he was planning.

Despite being a Hollywood legend, del Toro’s explanation that it was a film script didn’t speed up the investigation and get him through security. Instead, he was swarmed by agents, who clearly didn’t recognize him from dozens of movie roles spanning a nearly 40-year career.

“Five TSA guys come over and they hover around the script, and they’re looking at it and looking at it,” del Toro recalled. “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 delay, del Toro isn’t upset about being questioned. Instead, he gave the TSA agent a “thumbs up” for catching the questionable airport scenes in the script.

Meyers seemed to agree, saying, “You gotta give that guy credit because let’s say he let you go and something terrible happened. He told me it was a move! … And you believed him?!”

“It was a checklist!” del Toro said of the film’s opening scenes.

[From Parade]

Yeah, we’re usually grumbling about the TSA confiscating slightly-too-big liquid bottles (or bags of sunflower seeds), but this swarming of agents was duly warranted! Though, can you imagine if it had been a Marvel script? Kevin Feige would’ve had his own agents descend out of nowhere and issue short-term memory loss injections to all the TSA personnel who’d seen the script of one of their unreleased properties. And speaking of security guards, elsewhere in the interview, Benicio revealed there was a real, authentic Magritte painting on set. Holy cow! And of course for something so valuable, the painting’s cameo was contingent on its own personal security during filming. Seth made an astute comment in response, noting how great it was that in the midst of AI taking over everything, Wes Anderson insisted on a genuine Magritte painting for his film. In a world of AI, be more WA. Anyway, good on Benicio for giving TSA the thumbs up after he was cleared! Might I suggest to him that in the future, he keeps his scripts in folders while traveling?

photos credit: Olivier Huitel/Avalon, Julie Edwards/Avalon