Danny Trejo, one of the most recognizable faces in action cinema, has had roles in dozens of movies over the last several decades. One of those movies was Con Air, the Nicholas Cage-led blockbuster that saw Cage’s character end a prison sentence after serving time for accidentally killing a man in self-defense. However, his journey on board a prison transport plane doesn’t go to plan when some of the prisoners on board hijack the flight.
Trejo recently spoke to GQ magazine about many of his iconic screen roles and touched on Con Air as one such appearance. While the movie itself is an end-to-end show of macho egos and male testosterone, the actor revealed that working on the film was no different, with the stars all attempting to outdo each other in the “manly man” stakes. He said:
“Con Air is funny, because they want to put all the wannabe tough guys in a plane in Hollywood. Lunch turned into a big “Who’s got the biggest huevos?” If somebody spit, somebody else would, it was a spitting contest, if you did a push-up, everybody tried to do more push-ups, it became a big contest. They tried to bait you into things.”
Con Air was one of Jerry Bruckheimer’s big productions back in the 90s, and the film has stood out as being one of the most “macho” movies of a decade that, like the late 1980s, was full of movies with big, dirt-smeared leading men that just wanted to beat people up and shoot anything that moved. But, as Trejo has stated, it looks like it wasn’t just on screen that the big male egos came out to play.
Danny Trejo Also Reflected on His Fan-Favorite Role In From Dusk Til Dawn
Speaking of iconic appearances, Trejo’s GQ interview could not be passed without mentioning a handful of other classic appearances. Of course, the Robert Rodriguez directed From Dusk Til Dawn is top of this list for many, a movie about a pair of criminals who stumble upon a bar in the desert where things turn bloody after dusk. Trejo played barman Razor Charlie in the film and had the honor of being killed with a stake by FX legend Tom Savini. While he was not on-screen for long, Trejo definitely made an impact in the movie, and he certainly made an impression on one of his co-stars. He said:
“From Dusk Til Dawn, I stole the movie, man! The movie was so real. It’s like, you couldn’t help it being real. And then George Clooney was unbelievable. That was his first movie. God, man, 5-6 years later he did a film called Up in The Air and I just went to the premiere, and he starts screaming, you know, ‘Trejo! Hey come here!’ And he starts, he starts giving him my report. ‘Hey, he was in my first movie, brother!’ And I was like, Wow, this is George Clooney.”