The next five years of his working career were built on that first moment. He played prisoners. He played criminals. He played bodyguards and enforcers and cholo characters in films that were, by and large, not particularly distinguished. He has said himself that he didn’t fully understand at the time how narrowly he was being typecast — that the roles he was being offered were all variations on the same character, and that he was being offered them specifically because his actual biography made that character credible in a way that a conventional actor’s performance might not be.
The typecast worked in his favor, pragmatically. He was working. He was getting paid. The acting career provided income that the counseling work did not, and the income allowed him to continue the counseling work without the constant economic pressure of a life organized around survival. He was, through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a busy working character actor in Hollywood — someone who appeared in many productions in small roles, who was reliable and professional, and who brought a specific authentic quality to the parts he was given.
The collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, which began with a small role in Desperado in 1995 and expanded through From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and the Spy Kids franchise (2001 onward), was the relationship that transformed his career from working character actor to something considerably larger. Rodriguez, who has spoken extensively about Trejo’s qualities as a performer and as a person, created the Machete character specifically for him — first as a fake trailer in the Grindhouse double feature (2007) and then as a feature film in 2010.