The Spy Kids films, beginning in 2001, gave Trejo the role of Isador “Machete” Cortez — Uncle Machete, the kids’ weapons expert uncle, a deliberate in-joke for adult viewers that played as a genuine character for the children who were the films’ primary audience. The Machete character existed in the Spy Kids films as a supporting player, someone whose presence served the plot without being its center.
Rodriguez wanted to give the character more. The fake trailer for Machete, included in the Grindhouse double feature (2007) that Rodriguez made with Tarantino, was a deliberate provocation and a genuine test: here is this character, here is what a Machete movie would look like, here is Danny Trejo as a leading man in something that is unambiguously about him. The response to the trailer was sufficient to justify making the actual film.
Machete (2010) is not a serious film in the way that Heat or The People vs. Larry Flynt are serious films. It is a grindhouse exploitation film made with the budget and production values of a mainstream Hollywood production, starring a man who had been playing character roles for twenty-five years in a leading role that was specifically designed for him. It is a genre exercise and a piece of cultural provocation — its casting of Trejo as a leading man was itself a statement about what “leading man” could mean — and it worked commercially and culturally in the specific way that films designed to be fun tend to work when they are made by people who understand the genre they are working in.