Che Guevara’s image has been emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to beach towels and no one is a bigger fan of the revolutionary than Benicio Del Toro. The Spanish-speaking actor is starring in a new biopic entitled simply Che, which, despite being a two-part epic nearly five hours long, has sold out cinemas in Los Angeles and New York. Distributors now plan to give the film a wider release – despite mixed reviews – and part one will hit UK screens on Friday.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the film depicts Guevara, somewhat unrealistically, as a romantic, maverick rebel. Del Toro – displaying the sort of violent energy and charisma of a young Jack Nicholson – somehow pulls it off. “I was interested in playing Che from the start,” he says. “He is a big character – a man who made his mark on a generation and lives on in the memory.”

Del Toro remembers first hearing about Guevara in the Rolling Stones’ song Indian Girl (“Mr Gringo, my father he ain’t no Che Guevara/And he’s fighting the war on the streets of Masaya.”). He was then just 13 years old. Like a typical teenager, he thought this Che guy sounded “cool” and he has had a personal fascination ever since.

Playing him, however, was often more pain than pleasure. It took seven years to raise the money and even then it was only $40m (£27m) – peanuts in Hollywood terms – which meant the whole spectacle had to be filmed in less than three months. In one day, they started and finished five scenes, including one in which Del Toro flies into a rage and beats up a mule, and another in which he has to simulate an asthma attack. “It was very difficult playing him,” he admits. “Filming took about 82 days, with one day off a week, to make two films. So it was exhausting. I put so much of my life into him.”

At least people are finally talking about his acting. Before Che, and despite garnering consistently good reviews, Del Toro had been best known for an incident that made him the envy of men the world over – but one which, he says, never actually happened. After the Oscars ceremony in 2004, Scarlett Johansson, star of Lost in Translation, announced that she’d had a close encounter with Del Toro in a lift in the Chateau Marmont hotel in Beverly Hills. It made tabloid headlines the world over.

Why she said it, he is still unsure, although he presumes it was a joke. Johansson kept up the myth until she married Ryan Reynolds in September. “It was a nice thought,” says Del Toro. “But it would have been the fastest sex in history. We only went up a couple of floors.”

Del Toro was born in Puerto Rico, a United States territory in the Caribbean, to a family of lawyers, but his comfortable childhood was shattered when his mother died from hepatitis when he was nine. Aged 13 he moved with his family to the US mainland and was sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania. He signed up for a business studies course at university in San Diego, California, before switching to study theatre. His father would have preferred him to enter the law and, in retrospect, Del Toro can see why. It was a long road to Che. “I have picked up a lot of scars along the way,” he admits.

He had been appearing in movies for 14 years before he finally had his big breakthrough, in 2000, with Traffic. His first paid role was in an episode of Miami Vice, the 1980s detective series, and not exactly what he had in mind when he embraced the method school of acting as an aspiring young thespian. He played a villain in the James Bond movie Licence to Kill, in 1989, and despite attracting attention for his role in The Usual Suspects, in 1994, he was still pigeonholed as a Latino. Then came the critical mauling for the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with Johnny Depp.

“It took me a long time to get over that,” he says. “I remember a lot of people telling me at a screening how great I was and predicting how this was to change my life. Then the reviews came out and they were some of the worst you’ve read in your life.

“The movie sank without trace. For a while, I could not get a job. I even thought about quitting and doing something else. Then, just as suddenly, the film became a cult classic on video. I was back in again.

“It can get confusing and you wonder if you are going mad. At the point I did Traffic, I could not afford to pay my credit cards. I had been acting all those years and was broke.”

It could explain why Del Toro has kept the same car – his first – since 1992. “I bought a Ford Bronco in dark green and have never felt the urge to change it,” he says. “It does the job for me. It is a workhorse of a car. I even wear clothes I’ve had since the 1980s. I throw nothing away.”

Since turning 40 last year, Del Toro’s started thinking about settling down. “I have reached the stage when I want a family of my own,” he says. “I have thought long and hard about it since my 40th birthday. I have learnt two things after passing that age: I need to get established in a solid relationship, perhaps marriage, and I can no longer eat pasta, because it puts on weight too easily.”

MY STUFF...

On my CD player: The Clash album Live at Shea Stadium, an album of Bob Dylan bootlegs, the singer Bon Iver and stuff by George Harrison and Bruce Springsteen

On my DVD player: Virtually every film directed by Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola

I would never throw away: I don’t throw anything away. I keep all my stuff in boxes, even from 20 years ago. I am a hoarder and cannot remember ever throwing anything away at all