“Read this or I’ll kill you”: how Danny Trejo helped create “the best prison movie ever made”
Much as we’ve read all about the actors who are supposed to be lovely in real life, like Keanu Reeves and Tom Hanks, one name that is a surprise given the roles he plays are absolute psychopaths is Danny Trejo, who is by all accounts an absolute treat to chat to, which is almost as much of an eyebrow raiser as the fact he is one, 81 years old, and two, has grossed over $3.7billion at the box office.
Trejo has been ploughing a furrow as a succession of ne’er do wells and gangsters for as long as 40 years now, including in movies as important as Con Air and Michael Mann’s Heat, and it’s fair to say that his is probably the first one you think of when asked ‘what does a moustachioed knife-wielding bad guy in a movie look like?’
Given the California-born Trejo had an upbringing that included a father on the run for stabbing someone and first doing a drug deal at the age of seven before being arrested at ten, it’s probably not surprising that his early adult life was something of a challenging one, to say the least.
He was in and out of various jails throughout the 1960s, developing an addiction to heroin and crossing paths with the likes of cult leader Charles Manson before he found himself facing a possible death penalty when during a prison riot he hit a guard with a rock.
He reformed however, getting a diploma while serving half of his ten year sentence and stayed clean through the ‘70s before he got into the world of movies by first being an extra and then getting an agent. For the next ten to 15 years, he juggled small film roles with being a drug counsellor, seemingly typecast when he did land parts as a gritty prison type.
After a switch of agent, he landed Heat in 1995 and said he learned a huge amount from watching the likes of Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer and Jon Voight on set. But it was two years later on the action blockbuster Con Air that he made the contacts that would cement his reputation as a go-to-guy for threatening movie menace.
As well as Nicolas Cage and John Cusack, Trejo appeared alongside Steve Buscemi, and he wasted no time in making the most of it, demanding the Fargo star be involved in a future project. Trejo told Rotten Tomatoes: “There was a movie called Animal Factory; it was [written] by Eddie Bunker, and it was directed by Steve Buscemi. It’s probably the best prison movie that’s ever been made. It’s unbelievable. I actually helped produce that. Eddie had the script, was running around with it for a while, and then gave it to me and said, ‘See what you can do with it’. I remember handing it to Steve Buscemi on Con Air, and I said, ‘Here, Steve. Read this or I’ll kill you’.”
Much as pretty much everyone would do exactly what Trejo said if he were telling you to do something, given how flat out terrifying he is, Buscemi took note, as Trejo added, “And he read it. He loved it, but he said, ‘Danny, there’s nothing really in it for me’, and I said, ‘No, no, no, we want you to direct it’. So he got Willem Dafoe, and when he got Willem Dafoe, everybody else kind of jumped on it.”
Starring Dafoe and a post-Terminator 2 Edward Furlong, 25 years on, Animal Factory is not a well-remembered film, and seems to divide opinion between the audience and critics. Buscemi does in fact make an appearance alongside the likes of Mickey Rourke in the violent prison thriller that gives a short, sharp shock in just 90 minutes, and it features a cast of hundreds of real prisoners in order to add realism to the jail experience, but it didn’t fare well at the box office, bringing in less than 50 grand against a production budget of $3.6million.
Trejo though went on to considerable success with two Machete movies in the 2010s and has no less than 23 new projects on the books, including a new action thriller called The Wrecker with Harvey Keitel and Tyrese Gibson, seemingly comfortable in a typecast professional life.
