The real reason why Danny Trejo has died on-screen more than almost any other actor
For more than 40 years, Danny Trejo has been dying onscreen, and the actor wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s one of the most prolific names in the business, but film and television projects where he remains in one piece by the time the credits roll only account for a tiny percentage of them.
Since entering the business in the early 1980s, Trejo has kept his foot on the gas and never let up. Along the way, he’s notched more than 450 outings covering movies, TV shows, live-action, animation, and video games, ticking off every genre under the sun and, more often than not, meeting an early demise.
He’s been shot, stabbed, crushed, blown up, tortured, taken a pneumatic drill to the head, eaten by zombies, strangled, garrotted, decapitated, devoured by a shark, thrown in front of a moving train, and crumbled into dust after being turned to stone. If there’s a way to be killed, Trejo will find a way to add it to his collection, which he’s actively encouraged since the beginning.
One of the unlikeliest success stories in Hollywood history, Trejo fell into a world of drugs and violence when he was still a child, admitting he started smoking marijuana at the age of eight. As a teenager, a family member trained him how to work the streets and operate as a drug dealer while he battled his own addictions to heroin and cocaine.
He eventually turned his life around, having been a regular fixture of the California prison system throughout the 1960s. First, he became a substance abuse counsellor, and then he served as an advisor on film sets, offering his expertise on how hardened criminals and their acts should be depicted onscreen. That led to his appearance as an extra in 1985’s Runaway Train, and the ball was officially rolling.
He might have been typecast as the guy who always dies, but it was at least partially by design. For decades, Trejo has been established as one of the most instantly recognisable and borderline ubiquitous character actors the industry has at its disposal. For someone who’s been working for so long, some folks might think he’d get irritated at the majority of scripts being sent his way ending in yet another death.
However, that’s exactly the way he likes it. While there’s no doubt a heavy element of truth to Trejo being cast specifically by many filmmakers based solely on his reputation for getting his clogs popped, he’s regularly requested and insisted that the particularly ruthless or vicious characters he plays be killed, so that he can teach viewers – especially those of the younger generations – that crime doesn’t pay.
He’s been in that position himself, and he’s made a point of letting audiences know that if anybody wants to live their life on the wrong side of the law, there will be consequences. It’s an admirable approach to a second wind he could have never predicted all those years ago, and Trejo ain’t done dying yet, not by a long shot.
