An actor of character

EX-CON TURNED HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR AND RESTAURATEUR DANNY TREJO GETS AN AWARD OF A LIFETIME

Danny Trejo knows how people might perceive him — and he uses it to his advantage. He’s a tough guy who has appeared in dozens of popular movies, and he plays the same roles over and over chiefly because he lived them in real life. Now just weeks away from his 80th birthday, Trejo will be feted with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this weekend’s Santa Fe Film Festival.

He’s doesn’t mind taking a turn on the red carpet, but he’s more in his element when he’s working as a drug counselor for Western Pacific Med Corp. He’s been sober since 1968, he says, and working to help people kick heroin addiction since 1973.

“That’s what I do,” Trejo says. “When I go to the pen to talk, I let them know, ‘If you’ve got a heroin problem, call me. We’ve got detox. We’ve got maintenance. We’ve got rehab.’ The Good Lord put me in this space because I can walk into a prison, and I’ve got everyone’s attention. Same thing when I walk into a high school. All the people trying to talk to the kids can’t do it. I walk in, ‘Oh man, there’s that dude from Blood In, Blood Out.’”

Trejo is a warm, generous storyteller and is as surprised by his film career as anyone else. He spent much of his youth and early adult life going in and out of juvenile and adult detention facilities, including a stint in San Quentin, where he later returned (as an actor) to film his part in Blood In, Blood Out.

His first acting gig was in 1983, when he was 39 years old. Before he became an actor, he started making amends with people in his neighborhood where he grew up in Pacoima, California. He now lives just three miles from his hometown.

“The first way I helped out anybody was I started taking out the old people’s trash in my mom’s neighborhood,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be a nice guy,’ but all these people wanted to stab me. I had robbed everybody’s garage. But that’s what I started doing; I started taking out the trash for the people who were handicapped and old.”

One of his neighbors, an elderly man he helped with his trash, gave him a fake suede double-breasted jacket for his efforts. Trejo never forgot that.

When he moved and decided to start his own lawn care business out his 1959 Chevy Impala, he had one problem: He didn’t have any equipment. He decided to go door to door and ask people if he could use their mower and help them with their lawn. Eventually, one of his customers gave him a lawn mower that wasn’t being used.

“You can go right down the line,” he says. “Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of me helping someone else.”

His acting career began with dozens of smaller roles and was launched to a new level of fame when he got a role in Heat in 1993 alongside Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, and Jon Voight. (Kilmer is also receiving the film festival’s Luminaria Award this year.)

Trejo’s turn in Machete started with a cameo in the Spy Kids franchise.

He appeared in a fake Robert Rodriguez trailer in the 2007 film Grindhouse, which led to a starring role in Machete and Machete Kills. He didn’t set out to be a Hollywood star and it isn’t something he thought he wanted.

“Part of me said this is really cool,” says Trejo. “And the other part of me said, I’m working and I’ve got a check. When we did Machete, it kind of pushed me way up. All of a sudden, I’m carrying a movie, and the movie did really well, well enough to do Machete Kills. People would come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you’re a movie star.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m an actor.’”

He’s not just an actor; he’s one of the busiest people in Hollywood. Trejo is appearing in a film project in Houston that he can’t yet talk about and says after that, he’s headed to Cleveland to appear at a comic con. Then he’ll fly to London for his other role as a restaurateur who owns five Trejo’s Tacos restaurants in Los Angeles; he’s opening an eatery in Detroit and another in London.

He also played a real-life hero. A few years ago, Trejo was standing near a Los Angeles intersection when he witnessed a car accident that left one car overturned with a toddler still strapped in the backseat.

Without waiting for someone to yell “action,” Trejo leapt into service.

“The lady kept saying, ‘My baby, my baby, my baby!’ Well, in a movie called Storks, those were my lines,” he says. “I was going to say, ‘Oh, you saw my movie?’ And she was screaming that her baby was in the backseat. I felt so stupid. But I reached in to pull this kid out, and it’s funny the way God prepares you for things. The minute I looked at this kid, I could see he was special needs. I work with special needs kids, and special needs kids don’t like to be grabbed. A lot of the time, they’ll flinch. So I kept saying, ‘Use your super strength. Hold on to me.’ Then he grabbed me, and I could pull him out of the bucket seat.”

Trejo jokes that he’s heard people say he’s one of the most recognizable Latinos on the planet, but he says it’s good enough for him that he’s big in Pacoima, the place where he grew up. He’s still there, he says, because he wants to make a difference in the community.

“I always have ex-convicts and people who just got out of prison at my house,” Trejo says. “My neighbors will come over and say, ‘Here’s my keys. Would you tell Danny we’re leaving for a week? Would you have him feed the cat?’

“And then I say, ‘Hey, do they know that everybody in this house has been busted for armed robbery or burglary?’ ”