The Hollywood A-list is full of people who pretend to be tough for a living. On the metric of "toughness," nobody ranks higher than Danny Trejo. Today, he's known for movies like Machete, Predators, Heat, and countless others, but it's honestly a miracle he lived to see such a successful Hollywood career, as documented in his autobiography, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, co-written with his friend and fellow actor, Donal Logue.
Trejo's book pulls no punches when it comes to his past. He was twelve years old when he first took heroin, and he spent too much of his youth in prison for an endless variety of felonies. Eventually, he maintained his sobriety and became a drug counselor more than a decade before he took his first Hollywood acting gig. As of this writing, Trejo has been clean and sober for 52 years, and he's helped countless others achieve sobriety and improve their lives.
While promoting the release of Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, Danny Trejo and Donal Logue sat down together to speak to Screen Rant about the book and about their sober lifestyle, and how macho posturing is a far cry from the true masculinity that comes with walking a righteous path. In this sprawling conversation, they share stories of addiction, adversity, and triumph, and how they were able to make it through to the other side and become better, stronger, healthier men.
Screen Rant: Before we jump in, maybe this is heavy if anything's inappropriate, I don't want to be pressing any boundaries or anything, but can you talk a little about being at these Hollywood parties, where everyone can get half cut for free, and having the responsibility to maintain your sobriety?
Donal Logue: It doesn't matter. I mean, once you have sobriety inside... Look. If you're at Gio's Mobile Home Park on the north side of El Centro, California, people are getting wasted. They're getting wasted everywhere. It was funny, because I live up in Oregon in this small town, and people are like, "All you Hollywood people and all your drugs!" And I'm like, "Oh, there's no meth problem in this town?" And they're like, "Oh my God, this town is all meth'd out, there's zombies everywhere!" You can't change the external circumstances. You just have to dial in the internal one.
Danny Trejo: It's funny, but what you just said, like, when I go to a Hollywood party and everyone's doing whatever, right... At 9:30, I love to watch the girls when they get there at 9:30 or 10:00, fashionably late, and they're just all dressed up and everything... I watch them for a little while, and then 10:30, 11:30 comes along... Getting close to twelve, and you'll see some guy says, (drunk voice) "I told you you're a bitch!" And some girl going, (unintelligible drunken gibberish), and I just watch the chaos, you know? That's what happens. It's like, sure, parties are great from 8:00 to 9:30. After that, it's like... You know, c'mon, people look at drugs and alcohol like, "Oh, they're a lot of fun!" I look at them like, "Oh no, this ends up where you shower with 50 men." You know? You're locked up in a cell! (Laughs)
Donal Logue: By the way, I wouldn't be at any Hollywood parties if I did. I don't know how other people do it, God bless them, they can somehow still have substances in their life. I can't. I wouldn't be at Hollywood parties or have a career or anything if I hadn't. That was the first step, was putting that stuff down. I wouldn't have Hollywood in my life. In a way, I was lucky. Some people had big careers and had problems with stuff. They felt like, if they put it down, they wouldn't have a career anymore.
Danny Trejo: Yeah, exactly!
Donal Logue: For me, I was homeless when I moved to L.A. I got sober first. Then I had the gifts of this career. I was never confused about the fact that I received my career as a gift, simply because I did that, you know? You know what I'm saying, Danny.
Danny Trejo: I worked in a wrecking yard, I was a gardener, and then I've been a drug counselor since 1973. I didn't get into Hollywood until 1985, and I'm still working for Western Pacific rehab and med corp as, like, a... I forget what they call me...
Donal Logue: Honorary?
Danny Trejo: Consultant, yeah. But I still work in the field of substance abuse. We have methadone clinics, we detoxify addicts, still.
It's an incredible trajectory you have. I have the book. I haven't finished it yet, but I've been reading it, and it's incredible. I know that you two bonded as actors and in recovery, but what made you, Danny, trust Donal to help tell your story?
Danny Trejo: I first met Donal in 1991. I went to a meeting at the Drug and Alcohol Center in Hollywood. It's on Santa Monica Boulevard. It's basically a place to go to meetings and stay clean and sober, but drugs and alcohol were prevalent. This was the late-night meeting in Hollywood. Donal was probably one of the angriest people I ever met.
Donal Logue: (Laughs)
Danny Trejo: I know crazy angry. I've been to Vacaville State Mental Hospital for the criminally insane and I'd never met anybody so angry. I remember going, "Hey, what's up?" And he went, "What do you mean, what's up?!" I was like, wow, somebody's gonna kill this kid! It was just Godsent because eight years later, I ran into him on a film called Reindeer Games. We became friends. And then we stayed friends. I wanted to write this book, and every time I got a writer, they were great English Literature majors. I needed somebody who could write English literature, but who knew the streets. He grew up on the border, so he didn't only know the streets, he knew the alleys! In fact, my kids' mom, I let her read it, and she said, "It sounds like you." Because he wouldn't change the concept, you know what I mean? He might change a word that didn't fit.
Donal Logue: But I'll be fair to Danny; a lot of times, with these books that you see, someone interviews a subject for 15 to 20 hours. They sit with them and then they go off and write a book. They steal things from the internet, they couch it in a language that's not their voice. But everything in this book, Danny said it. I have thousands of pages of transcriptions. I wish we could have made a thousand-page book. I'll even say this: there were times when I was kind of structuring together chapters and stuff, and I thought, I'd just kind of put place keeper things in there, like, oh, someone's dialogue or something. And I would dig through my notes and find these typed-out transcribed pages. Invariably, Danny had said something that was way more brilliant than any writer could have invented. It's his mind, it's his life, it's his story, but what I felt was, what it required was just a lot of dedication. What I'm proud of is that this book is worthy of Danny's life. What would have been a bummer to me is if it had been a half-assed book about an incredible person's life. I think we take a lot of pride in the fact that the New York Times review of books, Amazon's Editors, it's been on the "best book list" of Apple books... USA Today top-five book must-read... And the reason is that we did justice. We put the time in. We didn't try to hustle this thing out really quickly. It took us almost three years from start to finish. From the initial proposal. Another writer wouldn't have been... You can't see the environment we're in, with Mario and Mikey Castillo in Danny's house. But you have to be able to hang in this world to be able to have the conversations that start getting to the real stuff. You know, the really deep, personal stuff that took a long time to come out. Danny, didn't it? Over the course, he started revealing things more and more that, I was like, "Oh my God, this is it, this is gold!" There were a zillion people who helped. Danny's ex, Maeve.
Danny Trejo: Yup.
Donal Logue: The mother of Gilbert and Danielle. And Gilbert, his son, they're geniuses. They would read it and say, "Man, this isn't really getting the real story or the deeper story." There were a lot of people, obviously the editor at Simon & Schuster, I have a friend, Hillary Liftin, who's a literary genius, and she was kind of that literary genius who's like, "The structure of the story can go..." You know, that stuff that happens in a book where you're like, "this, and then this and then this," and then it flashes back to something from childhood, and there's kind of a genius mathematics to the unfolding of a story in that regard.
Danny Trejo: She was really good.
Donal Logue: So we weren't alone in coming up with this document.
Danny Trejo: And Maeve, the mother of my children, the first time she read the stuff we wrote, she kind of said, "This is fine. You were a bad kid, you went to prison, you got good... But what about your mom, what about your dad?" And I said, "Well, it's their story." But no it isn't! Why do you think you've been married and divorced four times? Why do you think you've had children with women you weren't married to? That's all part of it! She said, "I walked into your mother's house when your son Gilbert was born. I've never been in a colder place in my life!" And I thought, what are you talking about? "There was plastic on the furniture!" That's the way I grew up. My step-mom was almost like an indentured servant to my dad. My dad married my step-mom, really to take care of me... But she didn't like kids! (Laughs) F***** up, huh?
Donal Logue: What the book really isn't... It's really not a weird, goofy traipse through Hollywood stuff, like, "Then I was on this set and I did that!" There's Hollywood stuff in there for the Screen Rant audience, you know, but it's more about, as human beings, we're always going to face difficult times and adversity. There's a thing in there, really a faith-based thing about what you can do. All of us are going to come up against hard times in life. And not only in our own lives. For me, when I was 25 and I was going through that really hard time in L.A. when I first moved here, angry and hurt and all those things, I was lucky enough to go, "Okay, I'll make this decision to help myself", which seems like an obvious one, but it's so hard for us when we're addicts and alcoholics. But then when my kids were going through some stuff, that's where the rubber meets the road. It's terrifying when people you love are in a hopeless or helpless situation. Danny's book, to me, was a roadmap for so many people facing anything in life, to realize that it's not... Danny, as you always say...
Danny Trejo: It's not where you start, it's where you end.
Donal Logue: And you can always wave the white flag and say, "Oh my God, this is too much for me. God, show me where to put my feet, step by step, and I'll do what I can do and you take care of the bigger picture because this is all too much." I remember asking my friend, Chris Davis, how do you know when it's too much, Chris? And he said, "It's always too much. It's always too much." Me hanging out with Danny to work on this book was the greatest gift that's ever happened to me in my life. And, you know, we've been very close friends for 22 years, but this thing was just... The amount of trust and the amount of time that he trusted me to basically be his recording secretary and put together his life story was an honor. I'm just excited for people to read it. I'm so happy it came out yesterday, so people worldwide can share in this book.
I'm trying to think about ways that I can apply the lessons to my life. I feel like such a p**** saying it, but in my family, it's been food. My father passed away last year, July 4.
Donal Logue: I'm so sorry.
And his weight was a big contributing factor. And I've fluctuated up and down over my life. I feel like, when I'm on the right path, it's like I'm making a deal with God every day if that's not so dramatic.
Donal Logue: It is! When I worked at the West Hollywood Drug & Alcohol Center, and Danny's been around this forever.. There used to be, like, 15 meetings a day, whether it was alcohol or cocaine abuse or sex or food or whatever. And someone said, "Whether you shoot it, snort it, drink it, have sex with it, it's just stuffing feelings." What happens is, we become overwhelmed with a little bit of an emotion that feels a lot for us. In that momentary thing, we reach for something. Believe me... I didn't have that issue when I first got sober. I had it later, with food, with gambling, with whatever it was where I'm seeking something outside myself, just to take me out of that painful thought for a second. If we can learn to sit with it, just through that thirty seconds of oomph...
I fight food hard, too. I get it. I think bagels and cream cheese at 3:00 in the morning with peanut butter on them or something, it's as strong as anything... I heard this person sharing about how they had this secretive thing, where after work, they'd go to the grocery and buy a bunch of Häagen-Dazs. Like, tons of it. And they were hurt. Their father had hurt them really badly and all this stuff. They'd go home and they were wallowing in that hurt, and they just couldn't stop, just eating spoonful after spoonful, gallon after gallon of Häagen-Dazs. And it made me cry, because it's not a p**** thing. It's a human thing. Right? That bulls*** thing... I will say this about certain heroin addicts or something. They were the ones pretending like they're the only ones who understand addiction because they did heroin. That's bulls***. The thing is, as it turns out, we're all p***ies. Because that's what makes us human. If we walk around talking like we're the baddest-assed dude in the world, and we've never been scared of anything, and no memory from our childhood has ever hurt us, that's a big lie. That's what bonds us as human beings. Danny talks about it so much, that's the thing that allows us communication with each other, because that's what we relate to in each other's stories. I can't relate to the prison stories. That is dramatic. That is different. But Danny understands that, as human beings, we all share this commonality of being hurt children or whatever it was. That's what sets us on this path for the rest of our lives, unless we recognize it and look at it and uncover it and realize, number one: we're not to blame for a lot of this stuff. And secondly, there's something we can do about it. But we can't necessarily do it alone, right Danny?
Danny Trejo: No way.
Donal Logue: You can't sit in a room and go, "In my brain, I'm changing!"
Danny Trejo: "I'll fix myself!" When I started writing, it was funny. Like I said, I had to find somebody who really knew me. And Donal knew me. When we wrote a few pages and I gave it to Maeve, the mother of my children, she said, "It sounds like I'm talking to you." And that's the only way that I would do it. So I trusted him with my life because I know he's trusted me.
Donal Logue: I've trusted him with my life. He's helped me through. He'd been through so many things in life before me. He had kids before me. So when I was going through a hard time with my kids' mom, he's like, "You're not alone. You're not the first person who's gone through this. This is how it's going to go down." I'll say this: I remember one time... This is Danny's genius in a zillion different ways, but this is one example. I had been living in this nice house in the Hollywood Hills. We had kids, it didn't work out, it was pretty bad. And so I moved out. I was living on an air mattress in my dressing room for Grounded for Life. So I came to Danny one day and said, "Man, I went up to my house and there's some dude living in there." Right? "Some new guy she's got, living in my house that I bought. And he's swimming in the pool and enjoying the BBQ." And Danny's like, "Great. Be friends with them. You want to be friends with whoever is around your kids." And that guy and I are really good friends. And his daughter, that he had with my ex, I'm really close with her. I'm close with all the kids. My kids live with me. I'm a single dad. And Danny, you know, you'd expect some guy to be like, "Man, go tell him what's up and mad dog him," and do all this stupid s***. All that does is hurt children who are stuck in the middle of it, right? Be nice to him! They're around your children. And he's nice to me because he knows. I'm around his daughter and we trust each other with each other's kids because they're like an extra parent to these children who need as much love as they can get from that generation above them. That's Danny's contrary, but brilliant advice in life, and how it applied to my life.
Danny Trejo: I would rather have a mangy dog for a friend than an enemy. It's that simple. My kids' mom, we split up 37 years ago. She remarried, had two kids, both [who are autistic], and then her husband left when they were about four or five or something because he couldn't [handle the kids with autisum]. Everybody wants their kids to be an NFL quarterback or some s***, you know? So my son was trying to help his mom, and couldn't, so we just took over. I helped raise those kids. Not mainly because of her, but because that's my son's brother. Understand? Theo, he sent out applications to colleges. The little s*** got accepted to eight different colleges! And two of them wanted to pay him! He's going to college in Ohio that's paying him to go!
Donal Logue: It's amazing to see. Danny played such a role in their lives, gave them some structure. Kids just want to feel like there's a home that they're welcome in. All of us. I'll say that about these recovery meetings that we go to. The thing that freaked me out about them the most, when I was lost... This was in New York, I didn't quite get it then, but I walked into this place, and I felt, "Oh, I don't want to be here, but I guess I have to be here, whatever." And someone asked, "Hi, what's your name? Would you like a cup of coffee? Here's a seat for you." And I wanted to burst into tears because nobody had given a s*** about whether I had a cup of coffee or a seat for a long time. No one had cared about me. Danny says it all the time: we're on the Titanic, man. This world's spinning fast. It's getting hot. All kinds of weird s***'s happening. The only thing we do have is we can help each other because life's hard for all of us. You never know what someone's going through, so say something nice to someone in the grocery store. I know when it happens to me when I'm locked into negative thoughts and all this bulls***, and problems in my life and this and that, and someone does something nice for me, I'm like, "Man, thank you, man. You just restored my faith in humanity, just when I felt like..."
Danny Trejo: Cutting my wrists!
Donal Logue: You know what I mean? You never know where people are at. Even if you're in a bad spot, help someone else out. It'll immediately make you feel better.
Danny Trejo: Better, right on. That's what we do. That's what my friends do. We'll help anybody. We're the guys who, we're driving down the street, we'll see somebody trying to move a refrigerator with his 108-pound wife. We'll stop and we'll yell from across the street because if they see us they'll call 911. So we call, "You want some help?" And we'll help them! I love when they try to give you five bucks or ten bucks. C'mon, God bless you!
Donal Logue: It's so weird. I was in Canada, I was just up there when quarantine ended, I was working up in Toronto. This old lady down the street bought a massive washer/dryer set that she's trying to get into her basement, right? And she's there, and she comes by the house. She's just knocking blindly on the door. And I'm there and she's like, "Can you..." And I'm like, let's see what the situation is. There's a guy in this trailer, and these things are massive. We don't have the proper dollies or anything. This guy's working on it for a long time with me. He's a super cool guy. He goes, "Man, I'm just a delivery dude!" And we ended up getting that stuff in there for her. And then the neighbors came and they were like, "I can't believe you were just jumping in!" I was like, dude, if I was just sitting there in the living room watching television, looking out the window, and watching good people try to move something and I wasn't helping, I'd feel like s*** about myself. This was fun! It wasn't hard! You know?
Danny Trejo: My son said it. Everybody was at this girl's house. They were gonna help the mom move, and everybody left for the beach, and my son stayed. I'll never forget, the lady said, "Your son said, my dad, would kick my ass if I didn't stay and help you." I'll never forget that. I wouldn't have kicked his ass, but I knew what he meant, and I love the fact that he stayed to help these people. That's what we do.
My mother is the same way. We grew up in a house where it was my family, so my parents and my brother, and my aunt, who is Venezuelan, and her eight kids. So there was always an entire village living together. When I was a boy when I was 4 or 5, my parents didn't know if I was going to look more... Actually, this works out, racially, if I was going to look more like Donal or more like Danny. Because I'm mixed race. So my mom showed me two movies. She showed me A Bronx Tale, which is extra because my dad was a bus driver, MTA for 20 years, and she showed me Blood In Blood Out.
Danny Trejo: (Laughs)
And when I was getting ready for this, I asked her, those were intense movies; maybe I kind of know, but why did you have me watch these movies, specifically, on repeat? And she said because we didn't know what you were going to look like, but we wanted you to know that, whatever happened to you while you were growing up, there was always a way back, a way forward, and that whatever you did, whatever you might do in your reckless young days, that wouldn't have to be who you are forever.
Danny Trejo: It doesn't matter where you start, it matters where you end.
And there's such authenticity in both of those movies, but you're only in one of them, so let's talk about Blood In Blood Out. I know you talked about this on Marc Maron's show, but that authenticity, of being genuine and being seen positively in any given community, just because of how real that movie is... Could you talk a little bit about how you knew that was going to be the real deal, and when you could play this role that was so true to yourself, more than any other role?
Danny Trejo: I read both scripts. I read Blood In Blood Out and American Me. I knew American Me was going to be trouble. And when I met with Edward James [Olmos], I told him, "Hey homie, this might be a thorn in your ass, homes." And he went, "Oh, well, theatrically..." And I said, "You're not dealing with theatrical people. You're calling this the Mexican Mafia. That's not smart, homes! Taylor Hackford was brilliant. He called it La Onda. We were La Onda. Even though it's the same story... We based it on real people, but we made it into a movie. He started it with a documentary. The biggest problem was that he documented some lies. Things that weren't true. I told him that. And he goes, "Yeah, but I want the young Chicanos to understand that this might happen." Oh, so you want them to understand a lie. You know? "No, you're not understanding!" Yeah, I am. Anyway, he had his own cross to bear. There's places I go to in East Los sometimes, and there will be three or four Righteous Mafia there, you know, just hanging out at a club, and when I walk in, they'll jump and salute, "Trucha, (watch out) La Onda!" You know what I mean? Because we didn't disrespect them. I would rather have a mangy dog as a friend than an enemy, I'm not going to disrespect them. And I knew them guys. That's why I told him. I said, "Look, I grew up with these guys, homes. You don't want to listen."
It's just about being honest.
Donal Logue: And by the way, just be honest. Don't say, "Yeah, I'm gonna tell this story honestly, but I'm gonna change..."
Danny Trejo: "I'm gonna change this, I'm gonna change that."
Donal Logue: One thing is, look... What's important is, that was an intersection between our world of film and television and what it does, and the very real world that it was attempting to portray. Edward James Olmos, to me, is one of the greatest actors of all time.
Danny Trejo: Unbelievable.
Donal Logue: I mean, I saw Zoot Suit when I was young.
Danny Trejo: I took my dad to see Zoot Suit! My dad was from 38th Street!
Donal Logue: And he shows up in Blade Runner, and I'm like... Who's that?! Man, you can't not watch him. He's an an amazing artist. This was just a weird thing. I know it's tricky because we tell these tales and sometimes it glamorizes. Even if you're like, "My intent is to not glamorize the criminal organizations" or something. Look, man, you're talking about A Bronx Tale or whatever it is, why are we so fascinated about these stories about... Like the kid in A Bronx Tale where they're like, "Man, I wanna hang out with those dudes across the street who are giving me fat stacks to go move cars or sell cigarettes or do this or do that. Or Mexican Mafia or biker gangs or whatever it is. Hey, it's part of the culture. But there is a kind of unwritten rule in there, and it's not that hard, you just have to distance it and not try and say, you know, "Oh, I want to make a movie about Hell's Angels, and I'm gonna play a guy who's a real guy, but I'm gonna change all this shit to make it fit an arc that I want it to." That's where it goes off. Also, it takes away the potency, artistically, of what you're trying to do.
Danny Trejo: The reality is, Edward, stepped into a realm that he knew nothing about. Nothing. And he wanted to play this character that was a real gangster, who was a Mafioso. So, instead of playing him real, he played him as an actor, understand? Instead of writing "real," he wrote as an actor. I remember, me and Eddie Bunker said, "You can't do this, homes. You're gonna get in trouble." And to show you... I met with Edward James in the morning. That afternoon, I get a call from my cousin, Sal, who was in Palm Hall, that's where they held the Mafiosos. And Sal says, "Danny, do you know Joe Morgan?" I said, "Yeah, I know Joe." He said, "Are you okay, homes?" "Yeah, I'm alright, what are you talking about?" "He wants to talk to you." And Joe [doesn't] call people unless he's gonna say, "We're gonna kill you." And then, he won't even call! But I said, "It's fine, it's cool, don't sweat it." He said, "Go over to Eddie's, he'll call you at 5:00." He calls Eddie, goes, "Hey, what's up, Joe? Here he is!" And he hands me the phone. I had met with Edward James about his movie at 10:00 at Jerry's Deli on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. That afternoon, that evening, Joe Morgan, leader of the Mexican Mafia, called me and said, "Hey Danny, I hear you're up for that movie, American Me." And I said, "Joe, I'm up for both of them. I'm up for Blood In Blood Out, too." And he said, "Which one are you gonna do, homes?" I said, "I'm gonna do Blood In Blood Out, why?" And he said, "Oh yeah, that's the cute one." See, he already knew we weren't going to disrespect anybody. Yes, we were going to make a movie about killers and bad guys, but we weren't going to say "The Mexican Mafia" and try to make a documentary. So I had his blessings, and he said, "You know, Danny, you could do the other one and get away with it, but va a caer un chingao de perro (they're gonna come down on this guy *in so many words) I remember him saying it, and Joe spoke perfect Spanish: "va a caer, un chingau de perro, homes." I was like, "I can see that, Joe."
Donal Logue: It's weird because it talks about Hollywood. We look at it through this light, where, man, it's such a weird thing. We do glamorize. Our world glamorizes bad guys and anti-heroes. But that was...
Danny Trejo: Mundo, one of the guys in the Mexican Mafia, got a documentary on television, and he said American Me was the best recruiting tool that could have happened for the Mexican Mafia. All the young Cholos wanted to join it. "Órale homes, that's the chingón (good) one, la Mafia." They couldn't wait.
Donal Logue: I think, more important and sometimes less sexy things... In the book, and Danny will talk about it, to be a real person, whether you're a white kid, or Mexican, black, whatever, it's to take care of your children.
Danny Trejo: That's the chingón.
Donal Logue: To be a good family member.
Danny Trejo: To be a great dad.
Donal Logue: To be self-supporting through your own contributions, to not mooch off people.
Danny Trejo: To pay your child support and not whine about it!
Donal Logue: And they don't really make movies about that, which is unfortunate, sometimes. The kid who comes up from the barrio or the hood or whatever, and he goes, "I went to college and I'm a CPA now."
Danny Trejo: "Yeah, but did you kill anybody? Were you a gangbanger?"
Donal Logue: We get drawn to that other stuff. To me, obviously, Danny would play those parts in Blood In Blood Out, and people would want him to give it some legitimacy, but it was Robert Rodriguez who was, like, "Danny, besides Desperado, I'm gonna put you in Spy Kids. For kids." That changed everything. It was the first appearance of Machete, you know what I mean? To be able to do movies that kids watch is the greatest responsibility, man.
Danny Trejo: They're still watching it! I've got five-year-old kids coming up today and saying, "I love you, Uncle Machete!" They're still watching it because he made it timeless! I can ask a five-year-old, a six-year-old, "Do you know who I am?" "Yeah, you're Uncle Machete. You're the real uncle!"
Totally. I'm thinking about... Just based on that, there's a story that my mom says. I wish she was here! She'd have a fit. She's so excited right now. But when she was a teenager, a guy came to her house in Honduras, and she didn't know who he was, and she chased him away with a machete. It turned out he was just her sister's boyfriend coming for a date. But for years afterward, that's what they called her. They called her Machete, in a little village outside La Lima in Honduras.
Danny Trejo: The record label that I started, we took all the kids... My whole record label (Trejo's Music), Baby Bash, Trish Toledo, Tarah New... We took them all to Pomona Fairplex, where we got all the kids from Honduras, all the little immigrant kids, and we put on a show for them. The staff was saying, "Some of these kids haven't even smiled since they've been here," and they were dancing and jumping up. Jasmine looks exactly like Selena, sounds like her. So when we were at Long Beach, same thing. Long Beach has mostly girls. And it's so funny, people are saying, "How could the mothers drop their children off at the border?" People don't understand. The cartels are snatching them up when they're five, six, seven, eight years old, and they're finding them, little Latinas, in the Middle East, in Thailand, because they're trafficking them. Mamas say, "I can't offer you anything, mija, so here."
Donal Logue: Yeah. How much love must it take for a parent to do that? People don't see it as the other side of... You know, we share an Earth together. Believe me, man, I did living in the United States.
Danny Trejo: I love it.
Donal Logue: I think it's the greatest country in the world, and we're so... I immigrated, but I'm so happy to come to a country that has so much bounteous goodness, so much amazing opportunity. And 95.9% of the rest of the world doesn't have that. They're faced with choices that we can't ever understand, growing up here. Do you know what I mean? Talk about getting caught between a rock and a hard place. My heart goes out.
Danny Trejo: I just thank God that our president, now, is a humanitarian. I just thank God. It's like, wait a minute, they are kids. You can't just ship them back and, what, put them in the cartel's arms? No. Even here, Governor Newsom, he gave me the okay, do whatever you want: go to Long Beach. So immediately, they called the mayors of Long Beach, of Pomona, and yeah, we're in. God, it was just so beautiful, to go to San Diego and then Texas.
Donal Logue: No one can solve all the world's problems and all this geo-political stuff. But what you can do is try to bring a smile to someone's face on that day.
Danny Trejo: And the kids from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, it's so funny... When I walked out on stage, they were like, "Machete! Machete!" I almost started crying. You hear these kids, some of them crossed Mexico. Do you understand? And not perpendicular; the long way! But they can still give love. It's unreal.
It's because there's no Latino Superman. There's Machete. All those Marvel movies, which I enjoy and devour them, at Screen Rant, oh my God, we're crazy about them, but we only get to be the sidekick of the guy. We don't get the costume. But you, Machete. You're it.
Donal Logue: That's what Robert Rodriguez said to Danny.
Danny Trejo: That's what he said!
Donal Logue: He goes, why can't there be a Mexican James Bond? Or a Mexican Batman? How empowering! In the book, there's a part where... It's so emotional. How crazy was it, the first Halloween after Machete came out? All these little kids in the neighborhood dressed up as Machete, not knowing that Machete lived here, but because now they have a character to dress up as.
Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood is available wherever books are sold.