I said, "No, no, no! That's 'Inmate #1' because that's the first five years of my acting career." I played Inmate No. You know what? I did a documentary called "Inmate #1," and everybody thought that it was "Inmate #1" because I'd done time. It's a lot to unpack here, so just to kick it off, can you just tell us how the project came about? What made you sit down and say, "You know what? It's time for me to put my story out." The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Ī lot of people who studied your work or who saw you in films over the years, and we saw interviews that we'd get like little bits and pieces of you, but this goes in. You can watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Danny Trejo here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below. I took a long stroll with Trejo down his amazing past on a recent episode of "Salon Talks." Yes, this man has a story. Trejo's past has gained him access to work on the kinds of exploitative movies I mentioned, and he walked away because he has that same kind of community loyalty. In "Trejo," Danny writes about his time in prison with Charles Manson, struggles with addiction, struggles with personal relationships, struggles with his kids, his road to recovery, financial hardships that arose during his career, and how he became a successful businessman, while feeding the homeless, surviving a stroke, meeting Obama and pushing for prison reform.
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Most know Trejo from the dozens of movies and television shows he starred in, including "Heat," "Machete," "Anaconda," "Breaking Bad" and "Spy Kids" to name a few, but that is just the second half of his life. Legendary actor Danny Trejo writes about the same kind of community loyalty in his new memoir, "Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption and Hollywood" (Atria, July 6).
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If my community knew that I was a part of a project that didn't honor our neighborhoods in the right way, I would not be able to come back home. I know that in America, everybody with money thinks that everything is always about money –– and it's not.
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The problem is that I have too much integrity to sell out my neighborhood, my family and myself, which is a rarity. If I had a dollar for every time a producer, director or actor tried to use my reckless background as a tool to add validity to their film or television show about "the ghetto," I would be a very rich man.