Then he follows said reporter into the restroom, where the business at hand does little to stop Trejo's riff about the time his then-9-year-old-son greeted Robert De Niro with a "Taxi Driver" imitation. ("I said, 'Mi hijo, how do you know that movie?' ")
Welcome to the world of Hollywood's toughest bad guy - or possibly its biggest social butterfly?
For more than two decades, audiences have watched Trejo play a litany of men you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley, characters such as El Jefe, Jumpy and Hoodlum No. 2. But when he's not starring as the requisite roughneck, Trejo cultivates a different image.
The former San Quentin inmate is, after a fashion, a political activist, a neighborhood guy, a mainstay of old-school Hollywood (he eats at Musso & Frank once or twice a week), a 12-step poster-child and motivational speaker, and last but undoubtedly not least, a man Mexican rock bands write songs about.
"I was doing radio interviews and all of them were asking me about my song," he said, referencing a track about him from Monterrey rock band Plastilina Mosh. "I'm like, 'Come on. I've gone from ex-con to icon.' "
Trejo adds a more substantial notch to his film resume this weekend with "Machete," Robert Rodriguez's immigrant satire-cum-exploitation film. Here, for a change, the actor plays the title character and the hero, the Latino legend of the overenunciated title ("Mach" as in macho, then the airless Spanish "T," then an ete that rhymes with sensei). A mythic, abstract force as much as full-blown character, Machete can pulverize baddies with little more than the flick of his wrist while making hotties like Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba fall into his bed with barely a head nod.
