Enlarge By Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY Unforgettable face, and life: "Man, look where I could have been," says Machete star Danny Trejo. "I could still be in prison. Hell, for all I did, I could be headed to the gas chamber." The character actor's background includes prison and rehab, but now he's starting to achieve real stardom. Danny Trejo had been out of the joint maybe a week when he came across an elderly neighbor struggling with two trash cans. Trejo approached the woman, who saw his ponytail, pit-bull body and blanket of tattoos. She raised her hands and begged him in Spanish not to harm her. Trejo said nothing. He took the cans from her, carried them to the curb and walked off. REVIEW: 'Machete': There's nothing hackish about this bloody, funny film "That's when I realized I had to show people I had really changed," Trejo says. "I had to change the way people saw me." To that end, Trejo has only partly succeeded. Many people still see him as a thug. Except now, he's paid handsomely for it. And after nearly 200 film and TV appearances, Trejo, 66, is anchoring his first big-studio film in Machete, which opens today. If Trejo is nervous about the pressures of being what director Robert Rodriguez calls the "first Latino superhero," he shows no signs of jangled nerves. "Man, look where I could have been," he says over breakfast. "I could still be in prison. Hell, for all I did, I could be headed to the gas chamber. This is all icing." Few would have pictured a film career for Trejo. Born in Los Angeles' rough Echo Park neighborhood, Trejo became known in the streets as "The Mayor," a reference to his gregarious nature (and iron-fisted rule). "I was so lazy and self-centered back then," Trejo says between mouthfuls at Paty's, a Toluca Lake diner where the waitress knows his order and he knows her as "darlin'." "Back then, I'd rather rob someone than make my own way," says Trejo, who is married and the father of three. But when he sold 4 ounces of sugar masked as cocaine to an undercover federal agent, being a criminal wasn't so easy. He spent 11 years in the San Quentin and Soledad state prisons on drug and robbery charges. One night in the late 1960s, Trejo and a fellow inmate incited a skirmish at Soledad, landing him in solitary confinement. "I knew I was on my last chance," he says. "I said, 'God, if you're out there, I'm listening. If you're not, I'm screwed.' " Trejo says he heard his mission loud and clear in that cell: to teach. Trejo completed a 12-step rehab program and was released in 1972. He became a drug counselor at his local intervention clinic. He works there still. In 1984, Trejo got a call from a drug addict he was sponsoring. The man, who was working on a movie crew, told Trejo he was tempted by the cocaine at hand. Trejo walked to the set in Los Angeles' warehouse district. A casting agent spotted his scars, crinkled-roadmap face and the tattoo of a woman in a sombrero across his chest and asked if he'd like $50 to be an extra. When Runaway Train screenwriter Eddie Bunker, an ex-inmate at Folsom Prison in California, recognized Trejo as San Quentin's lightweight and middleweight boxing champ, he suggested that Trejo take a job as a boxing trainer for one of the actors. "I said, 'Sure, just tell me how bad you want him beaten,' " Trejo recalls. Instead, Trejo trained young star Eric Roberts. When Roberts earned a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination, Trejo was hot property. "They still stereotype me as this tough Mexican criminal," he says. "But that's OK. I was one." Rodriguez cast Trejo as Machete, a blade-wielding ex-federale, in his Spy Kids trilogy (2001-2003) and in the mock trailer to the 2007 pulp film Grindhouse. In the film, Trejo comes after his crooked former bosses with few words and plenty of metal. "Danny would talk about doing a Machete movie for years," Rodriguez says. "So when we made the trailer for Grindhouse, I figured that would be enough to satisfy our need to make the full film. But the trailer triggered even more enthusiasm." Much of it propelled by Trejo, a bundle of energy packed into a 5-foot-7 frame. He does voice-overs and soap operas. He'll do TV, like Enrique on King of the Hill and Tortuga on Breaking Bad, or lend his voice to video games. He'll even sign a body part if it's smartly tattooed. "When I see some actor who doesn't have time for an autograph, it makes me want to beat the (epithet) out of them," he says. "I think it's cute that they'll act tough and put on their little fake tattoos to look mean. But when they're out on the street they're afraid to be seen." Not an issue for Trejo, who wears his past as a point of pride. He still speaks at prisons and isn't shy about inviting co-stars to do the same. To date, he says, only Robert De Niro has taken him up on the offer. "I'm glad I took the road I took to get here," he says. "I think it makes me grateful. Every day, I remember I could just as soon be in a jail cell." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more