The 1987 movie that convinced Danny Trejo he’d finally made it as an actor: “This is it”
As anyone who has ever lost an Allen key while trying to put together a bizarrely named bit of MDF furniture from Ikea on a Saturday afternoon, the importance of using the right tool for a job can’t be overestimated. And if you’re a film director in need of someone to play a terrifying Mexican gangster who looks like he would happily cut you for fun, you use Danny Trejo.
That has been the case for a long, long time now and its the reason that Trejo is so insanely prolific, because not only have there been an awful lot of movies made that have called for a character like that, he is not someone who will turn them down, regardless of location or salary, which probably comes from the fact that in his early years there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for cash.
Trejo, now in his 80s, has taken part in more than 400 films and TV shows of varying quality, and that’s putting it generously. But life on a movie set is still a far cry from his childhood, which involved being arrested at ten years old, trying heroin at 12, and spending the vast majority of his teens in and out of various prisons in California, for highjinks like maiming a sailor’s face with some broken glass and hitting a warden over the head with a rock.
He was a heroin dealer on the inside, a feared boxer, and he covered himself with the kind of tattoos that have become recognisable as a sign of incarcerated Mexican gang members over the years. It wasn’t until 1969, in his mid-20s, that Trejo finally got clean and tried to turn his life around.
Once he had, which took about a decade, he decided he wanted to try out being a film extra, after someone he met told him he could earn $50 a day by just standing around on set. But in the end, it was his background that got him into the industry when he was asked to help with a young man who had problems with cocaine on 1985’s Runaway Train starring Jon Voight.
While on set, he was offered a job first as an extra and then as a boxing trainer, earning $350 a day, a fortune for a man of his standing in the 1980s. A few years on, and after several more film roles, he was earning double that amount, but perhaps not surprisingly, he was completely typecast as a tough guy, a prison psycho, or a gang leader.
As he would later tell Brobible while looking back on his long career, “You know, when I first started out, I think there were ten movies where I never even had a shirt on because I have a big tattoo on my chest and every director was like, ‘Wait, wait, take your shirt off’. I used to think I was doing a different kind of movie because I was always without a shirt.”
But a 1987 action thriller finally gave him a chance to at least sartorially move up in the world, even if he was still playing an enforcer. Trejo added, “The first movie I ever got to wear one in was with Charles Bronson in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown. I got to wear a suit. I was like, ‘I made it. This is it’, you know what I mean? But my characters have been from a gangster to a killer to a gecko in Zootopia 2. I’ll do whatever you’ve got.”
Even in his twilight years, that mentality has not changed. Trejo has a staggering 20 upcoming projects on his to-do list, few of which are likely to trouble the box office too much but should keep him in moustache oil and neck chains for a good while yet.
