Danny Trejo knows: ‘I’ve been there, I’ve seen that’
In memoir, actor opens up about being typecast — and brush with Mexican Mafia
Recalling his years behind bars recently, the actor Danny Trejo sometimes snorted or rubbed his face with both hands, as if bracing himself against traumas a half-century old.
Some of these stories have been told; many have informed his wildly prolific work; and the most important are collected in his new memoir, “Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood.” In conversation, as perhaps on set, they flash across his face like involuntary tics.
“When I’m playing that insane, crazy person, I’ve been there, I’ve seen that,” Trejo said during a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I don’t want to be there. That place that you can go to is very, very real.”
A legendary Hollywood genre actor beloved for his roles and his off-screen acts of selflessness, Trejo got his break in the business after visiting a film shoot in 1985 to help someone on-set who was battling through addiction recovery. He’d done it himself. Decades earlier, deep in the hole at Soledad state prison, Trejo had promised God he’d help his fellow human every day if he could “die with dignity.” And he had gone sober.
An assistant director stopped him that day on the set. “You have a good look,” the crew member said. “Can you play a convict?”
Funny question. He got hauled into a police station for the first time at age 10, he writes. From that point on, he spent years engaging in criminal mayhem in the San Fernando Valley and up and down the state, cycling through juvenile and state prisons and never expecting to come out alive. Could he play a convict?
As an extra in “Runaway Train” that year, Trejo stood out so much that he got a scene built around him, showing off boxing skills he’d honed in prison. In short order, he began appearing in a proliferation of shows and films as an archetypical supporting figure: Prisoner, 2nd Inmate and Tough Prisoner No. 1 are some of the roles he’s played since.
“I didn’t know I was being stereotyped,” Trejo told The Times. “I just knew I was working. And I think the fact that I was stereotyped for so long got a lot of people jobs, so we just opened the door.”
Trejo’s face, famously mangled by lived experience, offers an ideal expressive palette for the actor he became; he can convey rage and humor like few other villains on screen.
While the general arc of Trejo’s story is well known, many other formative details and wild intersections are revealed for the first time in the book, co-written with actor and longtime friend Donal
ways.
One crystallizing episode came when Trejo was weighing offers to appear in two films in the works in the early 1990s. One was “American Me,” to be directed by Edward James Olmos; the other was “Blood In, Blood Out” by Taylor Hackford. Both sought to tell the story of the founding of the Mexican Mafia.
It was a sensitive subject. Trejo, with his imposing physique and years of time served, would have been a great fit for either film. There was a problem, though. The Mexican Mafia, or “Eme,” is highly secretive and notorious for its ruthless executions, according to federal cases. Word was already getting around the penitentiary system that the “American Me” script took offensive narrative liberties — related to prison rape and the Eme’s fraternal codes — that were upsetting real-world gang leaders. The proposed film would also explicitly use the term “Eme,” another no-no.
Seeking to cast Trejo, Olmos arranged for a meeting. Trejo showed up at Jerry’s in Encino as anyone might for a Hollywood sit-down, in casual business attire. Surprisingly, Olmos appeared in “full cholo wear,” Trejo writes, including a “blue shirt buttoned up at the top and flying open to the bottom.” Trejo says Olmos was trying to speak like an “OG from the streets” throughout their meeting.
“Everything was ‘theatrical,’ ” Trejo recalled of Olmos’ pitch. “And I said, ‘You’re not dealing with theatrical people here. You’re dealing with people who get mad and show up in the middle of the night.’ ”
Sure enough, just before a second meeting with Olmos, Trejo got a message: Joe Morgan wanted to talk.
Joe “Peg Leg” Morgan, incarcerated at the time, was then the living don of the Eme. “Joe Morgan doesn’t call people unless he’s saying, ‘You’re dead,’ ” Trejo said.
He took the call. Morgan got right down to business. He asked Trejo which movie he’d do; Trejo said he was leaning toward “Blood In.” “I’ll never forget: ‘Oh yeah,’ Joe Morgan said, ‘The cute one,’ ” Trejo recalled with a laugh. Morgan approved the choice.
Trejo took a smallish role in “Blood In, Blood Out,” an experience that allowed him to return to San Quentin for the first time since he was an inmate there, this time as an actor.
His reflections are finely rendered.
“You got to remember,” he said, “in 1968, I’d made a deal (with God). I said, ‘If you let me die with dignity, I’ll say your name everyday and I’ll do whatever I can for my fellow inmates — and I said ‘inmates’ because I never thought I’d get out of jail.”
A year later he left prison for good. Trejo, now 77, has more than 400 credits, according to IMDb, a remarkable achievement for someone who could hardly have imagined a film career as he prayed at Soledad in 1968.