Actor Daniel "Danny" Trejo, who went from being the go-to bad guy in countless movies to the star and hero of his own hit action movie franchise, will be the official celebrity starter for the First Ever 17th Annual World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade next month.
Trejo, 75, a native of Los Angeles, told The Sentinel-Record he has never been to Arkansas before, let alone Hot Springs, but "I can't wait to go. I'm very honored for the opportunity. I will have a lot of fun while I'm there."
Trejo will be joined in his parade duties by his frequent co-star and close friend, actor Richard "Cheech" Marin, of "Cheech and Chong" fame, who will be the celebrity grand marshal.
"I love him," Trejo said. "I've known him for years. Hollywood can be a hard place, but he and I have stayed friends for years. He's a wonderful man."
Trejo and Marin have both appeared in a number of movies directed by Robert Rodriquez, beginning with "Desperado" in 1996, and its sequel, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," both starring Antonio Banderas, the horror film "From Dusk Till Dawn," which also starred George Clooney, and the "Spy Kids" franchise which yielded four movies.
It was his role as Isador "Machete" Cortez, a federal agent, in the "Spy Kids" movies and in a "fake trailer" for a "Machete" movie that appeared in the "Grindhouse" double feature directed by Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino that led to his starring in a real "Machete" movie and a sequel, "Machete Kills."
"Robert and I talked about it while working on 'Desperado.' He wanted to do a movie about a Mexican federal agent. We talked about it a lot and then we put him in 'Spy Kids' and named him Machete and then we did the fake trailer," he said.
"After the trailer came out, everyone started screaming they wanted to see that movie and then we just did it. The funny thing is that everything that was in the trailer was actually in the movie."
Asked which of his movies is his favorite, Trejo admitted "Machete" will always hold a special place.
"I would love 'Machete' even if I wasn't in it," he said. "It was just a great, fun movie. Even my mom liked it and she hates violence, but it's so over the top it's funny."
He said another of his all-time favorites, though, was "Heat," the Michael Mann directed crime film in which Trejo played a character aptly named Trejo.
"You had (Robert) Deniro, (Al) Pacino, Val Kilmer, you know, (Tom) Sizemore, Jon Voight. It was just an awesome movie," he said.
Trejo and Rodriquez, a native of San Antonio, are actually second cousins, but Trejo said they didn't figure that out until after he was already working on "Desperado."
"My family is all from San Antonio and one of my uncles said, 'Hey, that's your cousin!'' It's crazy," he said.
He recalled first getting the part in "Desperado," noting, "I walked into (Rodriquez's) office in Venice, Calif., and he looked at me and said, 'You remind me of the bad guys from my high school,' and I told him, 'I am the bad guy from your high school.' Ever since then we've been buddies."
Trejo sort of fell into movie stardom by accident. Having spent time in prison earlier in his life due to drugs, including a stint at San Quentin where he was a champion boxer, Trejo cleaned up his act and became a drug counselor to help others.
"I was running around L.A. trying to be an extra in movies," he said. "I had no dreams of being an actor, but they would give you $50 a day for being an extra and I thought that was cool."
He said an actor he had worked with as a drug counselor was filming "Runaway Train," a prison movie starring his future "Heat" co-star, Voight, and a young Eric Roberts. He said his friend "was having trouble with drugs down there and asked me to come down there to help him."
Trejo said he was "just kind of hanging out" on set when he ran into another old friend and former inmate from San Quentin, Edward Bunker, who was the screenwriter for the movie.
He said Bunker introduced him to the director and they asked him if he was still boxing because they wanted him to train Roberts to box and offered him $320 a day.
"I was like, 'How bad do you want this guy beat up?'" he said, laughing.
He said the director liked him and ended up casting him as the other boxer who fights Roberts in the movie. "It kind of took off from there," he said. "I played inmate No. 1, bad guy No. 2. For the first five years of my career, that's pretty much all I did. I had a great thing going."
His journey to stardom is chronicled in the well-received documentary, "Inmate No. 1: The Rise of Danny Trejo," which was released last year and includes commentary by Rodriquez and Marin and other co-stars, family and friends.
In addition to movie and television work, Trejo is also a successful restaurateur with his chain of "Trejo's Tacos" in California.
"Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else," he said, noting he did a friend a favor by appearing in a low budget movie and the director/producer noticed he liked good food.
"I wouldn't eat fast food. I liked to eat well," he said. "He suggested I open a restaurant and I jokingly said, 'Yeah, I'll call it Trejo's Tacos.' Two movies later he brought me a business plan for it. We looked at it and it was a winner. So we searched out a spot on La Brea and called it Trejo's Tacos. It did well and four years later, we've got seven restaurants."
Trejo said most restaurants "die after the first year" but his has been doing well and he has since branched out into doughnut shops. "Someone asked me, 'What's your secret?' The secret is good food. People don't keep coming back for bad food," he said.
Speaking of helping others, movie hero Trejo became real-life hero last summer when he rescued a young child trapped in an overturned car in Los Angeles. According to The Associated Press, on Aug. 7, two cars crashed at an intersection in the Sylmar neighborhood and Trejo and another bystander rushed to help.
"It happened right in front of me," Trejo told The Sentinel-Record. "Rather than go around them, I stopped my car to see if anyone was hurt and I heard this lady screaming. I went to one of the cars that had wrecked and saw this baby inside, he was a special-needs child, and he was freaking out."
Trejo said he knows from past experience "these children don't like to be grabbed so I started talking to him. I told him to hold onto my neck and use his superpowers. He put his little arms around my neck and I pulled him out. Then we got the grandmother out. It was so cute. (The child) saw his grandmother and told her, 'Use your superpowers!'
"I just thank God it all worked out. I was talking right after with my friends and my stepson and one of my friends said, 'God always seems to put you in the right place.' My stepson, who has autism, heard that and said, 'God watches his movies.' I thought that was so cute."
Trejo noted his stepson's mother is an activist for special needs children. "Everyone around me is dedicated to helping people," he said.
That desire to help also extends to his four-legged friends as Trejo helped found K-9 Compassion, an organization in Los Angeles dedicated to promoting dog adoptions, spaying and neutering and dog safety.
"What we do is we just love animals," he said. "We take care of them, like abandoned dogs. One thing I really like is "SPAY FOR LA" where we go around and spay and neuter dogs for free. It's awesome."
Although he has never been to Arkansas, Trejo said his son's mother has relatives in the state and in typical Trejo fashion, he wanted to "give a shout out" to some of them, rattling off several names, "Melanie and Shane Martin, Jen Vanderpool, Jeanette and Don. Maybe they'll be able to make it out for the parade."
The First Ever 17th Annual World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade will be at 6:30 p.m. March 17 on Bridge Street in downtown Hot Springs.
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February 16, 2020 at 04:23PM
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