Do we like Guillermo del Toro?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent on both tests: the record shows him backing immigrants and young filmmakers, with only a thin patch where I couldn't verify his record on LGBTQ+ issues.
Del Toro grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, drawing monsters all day, which did not thrill his very Catholic grandmother. He has said she exorcised him twice with holy water. At 13 he shot his first film with a borrowed camera, and in 1993 he mortgaged his first house to make Cronos.
The career arc runs from there to Hollywood with Mimic in 1997, then Pan's Labyrinth in 2006 and The Shape of Water, which won Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars. Mimic was no fairytale: he told The Guardian in 2026 that the Weinstein brothers clashed with him on it and tried to fire him. At Cannes he named it the worst filmmaking experience of his life.
The Shape of Water also brought his one proper legal drama. The estate of playwright Paul Zindel sued in 2018, accusing the film of borrowing from a play. A judge threw it out, an appeals court revived it in 2020, and in 2021 it was resolved, with Searchlight saying the claimant called the claims unfounded. Del Toro denied it all along, saying he had never read or seen the play.
On the harm test, he comes up clean. At his 2019 Walk of Fame ceremony he rejected the rhetoric about immigrants, without naming Trump, and said fear is used to divide people. His real hobby horse lately is generative AI, which he says he has no interest in using, ever. That's a creative stance rather than a harmful one, though some Netflix-loving fans might wish he'd chill.
I'll be straight about the gap: the pages I could read didn't give me a clear, quotable record from him on LGBTQ+ rights, so I can't hand him a gold star for that. What I did find is nothing nasty, and outsiders are the point of nearly everything he makes. He has also built his career with a wide mix of collaborators, and no harmful company turned up.
The good stuff is practical. In 2018 he helped launch the Jenkins-Del Toro International Film Scholarship, worth $60,000 a year to a Mexican filmmaker who wants to train overseas. At the launch he said that if we change a life, we change a generation. He's been loudly defending crew and creators ever since, which is a pretty decent way to use a big platform.