Con Air (1997), a Nicolas Cage action film with a large ensemble cast of criminals, prison inmates, and law enforcement, gave him a visible role in a film that was a significant commercial success. The film’s premise — a transport flight carrying dangerous prisoners goes wrong — was a natural context for the specific kind of menacing screen presence Trejo had developed, and the role placed him alongside John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, and other character actors who were doing similar work in the same commercial register.
His television work in this period was similarly consistent: guest roles on shows where a specific physical type and a specific kind of screen energy were required, often in crime dramas or thrillers, often in roles that required him to be threatening or at minimum formidable in a way that the scene required.
Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan’s AMC drama that ran from 2008 to 2013 and is frequently cited as one of the most significant television dramas ever produced, included Trejo in a recurring role as Tortuga — a DEA informant who works both sides. The character is used to particularly dark comic effect in one of the most talked-about scenes of the series’s second season, a scene that requires almost nothing from Trejo in terms of live performance but that has, paradoxically, become one of the most memorable things associated with him. The scene reflects what the Breaking Bad production understood about Trejo: that his physical presence and the associations it carries are themselves a kind of storytelling shorthand that the audience reads immediately.