The Star Wars universe added him to its expanding roster of character actors in The Book of Boba Fett (2021–2022), the Disney+ limited series that extended the Boba Fett character from The Mandalorian. His role as the Rancor Keeper is a relatively small one in the context of the series, but its presence reflects the degree to which his career had, by the third decade of the twenty-first century, expanded across nearly every major American entertainment franchise — Star Wars, The Machete films, the Spy Kids franchise, Breaking Bad, and dozens of other film and television productions.
He has described dying on screen approximately 65 times across his career. He has said he deliberately chose parts where the bad guy loses — a specific preference that he connects to his sense of responsibility to the young audiences who watch the films, and to his own history as someone who was, for a significant portion of his life, the person the audience would have been rooting against.
## The Face and What It Means
Danny Trejo’s face is one of the most recognizable in contemporary American cinema, and what it communicates to audiences has been extensively theorized in film criticism and popular writing. The tattoos, the facial structure, the weathering produced by a life that included years in California prisons — these physical features combine to produce something that the camera reads as specific and legible without the audience needing to know anything about their origins.
He has spoken about the face with a directness that prevents sentimentality from taking over the conversation. He knows what casting directors see when they see him. He knows why the phone rang for Runaway Train and not for the romantic comedy that was probably also filming in 1985. The face is the result of his actual history, and the history is what produced both the face and the person, and the person chose to use the history in specific ways rather than being consumed by it.