Benicio del Toro Swarmed by 5 TSA Agents Because of the Content of a Script in His Carry-on

Benicio del Toro had a dramatic run-in with TSA for an unexpected — but very understandable — reason.

The actor was traveling from Boston to Los Angeles, when he was asked by a security worker at the airport to inspect the contents of his carry-on, he told host Seth Meyers on the Wednesday, June 4, episode of Late Night.

His bag contained the script for his new film, Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, printed in an extra large font for easy reading. “The opening scene is [called] ‘Interior Airplane: Bomb’,” del Toro reveals to a big laugh from the crowd, but it gets worse. “The second scene is ‘Interior Cockpit: Eject the Pilot’ and the third scene is ‘Crash.'”

The star explained to the TSA worker that it was a film script, but that didn’t satisfy the employee, who held up a finger telling him to wait before leaving.

“Five TSA guys come over and they hover around the script, and they’re looking at it and looking at it,” he recalls.” 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.”

While the hold up was a minor inconvenience, del Toro has nothing but praise for the TSA worker who stopped him. “I give that guy a thumbs up because he was paying attention.”

“You gotta give that guy credit because let’s say he let you go and something terrible happened,” says Meyers, who plays out the scenario: “He told me it was a movie! . . . And you believed him?!”

“It was a checklist!” explains del Toro completing the scene.

In The Phoenician Scheme, del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, a wealthy businessman, who has a surprising number of airplane related fiascos in his past.

Del Toro is far from the first star to experience an airport security snafus. Hugh Grant recently shared a less lighthearted run-in.

In April, the actor called out an immigration officer at London’s Heathrow Airport for allegedly acting “intrusive, insulting and creepy” during an encounter with his children.

In a post on X, Grant claimed that official asked his kids if he and his wife Anna Eberstein were their parents.

“Just came through Heathrow with wife and children,” Grant’s post read. “We all have the same last name (Grant) on our passports. Immigration officer engages my children in chit chat then whispers to them ‘Are these your Mum and Dad?’ Intrusive, insulting and creepy.”

Grant shares daughter Tabitha Xiao, 13, son Felix Chang, 11, with actress Tinglan Hong, he is also dad to son John Mungo, 12, and daughters Lulu Danger, 9, and Blue, 6, with Eberstein, 46.

Channing Tatum revealed in an August 2024 interview that he often gets delayed not for any suspected breach but because one of his famous movie quotes is said to him “every single time” he goes through security: “My name is Jeff.”

“It’s weird what happens in pop culture like that, you know? It’s such a small moment in the movie,” he says of the 2014 comedy 22 Jump Street. “I remember we did a table read and it wasn’t even that funny at the table read. It was like whatever. And all of a sudden, man.” 

Similarly Winona Ryder said she gets a repeat request at TSA: to recite “Beetlejuice” three times like her character in the classic movie and it’s recent reboot.

“I have missed flights because the TSA people wouldn’t let me through unless I said it three times,” Ryder shared last August.