Danny Trejo Is Everywhere

When it's all said and done, this will probably go down as the quintessential Danny Trejo role. He shoots guns, throws knives, jumps out of a window using a dude's intestines as rope, and gets to nail both the bad guy's wife and daughter. All while looking mean and mad.

On top of that, the film strives to deliver a legitimate cinematic hero to the large Hispanic American community, so it's political as well. Until the end of time, when we picture Danny Trejo, this is what we'll see: a gigantic leather scowl holding several knives.

Danny Trejo did not come to Breaking Bad in order to kick ass and take names. Few do. It takes a whole different level of dangerous to survive that show, as Danny Trejo learned when his head was chopped off and placed on the back of a tortoise. Then, just for good measure, his head was blown up as well. It was the kind of gigantic "holy $#!^" moment the show delivers once or twice a season, and Danny Trejo got to be a part of it.

Still, if you're gonna go out, there are approximately ten billion worse ways to do it. Even in death, Danny Trejo seems somehow invincible.

Few appearances reveal just how often Danny Trejo pops up in popular culture than his quick cameo on ABC's Modern Family. When Mean Blonde Lady puts on a dance for her kid, Happy Big Boob Lady pushes in on her turf, and tensions run high between the two. It doesn't seem like the kind of situation that screams for Trejo action, but he shows up anyway to give the ladies one more thing to fight over.

This role could have been played by anyone, but Danny Trejo gives it that extra oomph if only for making people stop and say, "hey, wasn't that just Danny Trejo?"

Sometimes movies have no time to properly introduce all their characters, so it helps if an actor's face can fill in the blanks by itself. This is the very nature of Danny Trejo's career, and Predators offers us a great illustration of how it works. 

In the film, a bunch of badasses are air-dropped onto a mysterious planet where alien poachers hunt them down for fun. We get to know some of these characters better than others, but the ones who go early need to look as cool as possible because they're certainly not going to have time for long speeches about how many bears they wrestled and ate. When Danny Trejo's character tells us he's an enforcer for the Mexican drug cartel, we don't ask twice. When he's the first to get killed, we think it's pretty impressive.