[Benicio Del Toro] was about to play Jerry [in Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)], a guy whose struggle to quit heroin mirrors his friend Audrey's (played by Halle Berry) struggle to recover from her husband's death -- how to kick love to the curb is the essence of it. So on that last anxious night before action, he riffled through his mental files for inspiration and desire, his great, confused collection of imaginary index cards. Sometimes it's a poem he's read or a painting he's seen that provides the necessary boost; sometimes it's how the guy sitting next to him at the bar asks for his drink; sometimes he pockets someone's entire life like a pack of matches and takes it out when he needs a spark. This time around, though, it was just a piece of graffiti that floated to the top of the stack after all these years: SAME SAME.

When he talks about it, when he talks about anything, he sounds as if he's fucked up, but it's more that he's choking on the clutter in his attic.

"For me, it just, you know, said something about being levelheaded, not taking those ups and downs. I thought it said something about, you know, like, how to stay in that middle. Like, too happy would trigger him one way, too sad would trigger him another way, too much money would trigger him one way, not enough money would trigger him another way."

Struck, Del Toro summoned himself to move. He jumped off his bed, called the hotel's front desk, and asked where he could get a T-shirt made. Turned out there was a little place across the street -- open till midnight. ("I was like, Are you kidding me?") He dashed over and had SAME SAME printed in thick block letters on a plain white T-shirt. It became very important to him that Jerry wear the T-shirt in Things We Lost in the Fire. It made perfect sense to Del Toro that this would be so.

Except the film's director, a spirited Danish woman named Susanne Bier, did not like the T-shirt. She didn't get it. Maybe it was the language barrier; probably it was that Del Toro is flat-out hard to get. Either way, she resisted, and the Bull dug in his hooves, back and forth like that, until Bier finally relented, and today we see Jerry jogging in this curious T-shirt, spun out of some L.A. kid's graffiti and a Vancouver souvenir shop.

But that wasn't the end of it. Del Toro's known as Benny the Troublemaker not for nothing. There are other scenes, several of them, in which only he knows he's wearing the T-shirt, a silent rebellion. He turned it inside out, wore it under blankets and bathrobes, even sneaked it onto a shelf in the background. For him, SAME SAME had become his mission. "Because at that point, I am that guy," he says. "I become the book."

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