The 1992 movie Danny Trejo turned down that left 10 people dead: “It’s a horrible chapter”
With almost 500 credits to his name in movies, TV shows, and video games, you’d be right to think that Danny Trejo doesn’t turn down a lot of roles, but on one of the rare occasions he did, it turned out to be the smartest decision he could have made.
Trejo’s rags-to-riches story has become Hollywood legend, with the convicted felon turning his life around and becoming an inspiration, graduating from prison to prime spots in some huge movies. He’s been killed onscreen more times than most actors, but he’s got a reason for that.
Having lived the experience, he knows more than most people in the industry that crime doesn’t pay, so when Trejo plays a criminal, a gangster, or a villain, he’s always been insistent that his characters don’t make it to the end credits to hammer that point home for audiences. In the early 1990s, though, the shoe was violently placed on the other foot.
When Edward James Olmos was casting his feature-length directorial debut, 1992’s American Me, he offered Trejo the part of Pedro Santana. A hard-hitting drama about how the Mexican Mafia rose to prominence within the California prison system, the latter knew that it was a risky film to make.
Before he had the chance to turn it down, Trejo was also offered a part in James Mangold’s Blood In, Blood Out, another picture with some shared narrative and thematic DNA. Prior to his second meeting with Olmos to discuss American Me, the actor was contacted by Joe ‘Pegleg’ Morgan, who suggested that he’d be better off working with Mangold.
The Mexican Mafia wasn’t happy with the creative liberties taken by American Me, and Morgan suing the production was the least of its concerns. Indignant at the way they’d been portrayed, the syndicate’s displeasure with the movie went beyond the prison walls and spilt out onto the streets.
“I had no idea just how bad things were going to get,” Trejo recalled. “The word on the street was at least eight people died because of their involvement in American me, maybe ten: four outside and four to six inside.” He named one of them as Charlie Manriquez, a Mexican Mafia member who was gunned down for appearing in the film as an extra.
Trejo also remembered how “another guy was shot seven times just for being in the deep background of a scene where he sits in a car,” while a community liaison and consultant on the project “was executed outside her home in front of her son.”
The gang hadn’t given its blessing to Olmos, but he made it anyway, leaving Trejo to compare him to “a kid playing with a grenade, thinking the whole time it was a sparkler.”
“It’s a horrible chapter, made worse because it was all so avoidable,” the Heat and Desperado alum surmised. Trejo may have literally dodged a bullet by turning down American Me, and in chastising Olmos for going ahead with the lingering threat of real-world violence hovering above him, he made a point of noting that it was “irresponsible to pretend there might not be repercussions.”
