Is it weird that every time I see this man, I want to hug him? I know he mostly plays bad asses, but…just me? Trejo tells us that the film, which is coming out in April, will have that same sort of “raw quality” that GRINDHOUSE had, saying, “I love that. Get a bag of popcorn and just sit and watch and you go back to the 1960s.”
We asked him how Rodriguez works with him, creating characters. He said, “Well, Robert had been training me…god, that sounds really silly…for MACHETE since we did DESPERADO. Everybody thinks that MACHETE came out of a trailer, but it didn’t. Robert told me that he wanted to do this movie called MACHETE when we were doing DESPERADO. If you look at the character in MACHETE, it is a metamorphos…[pause]…is that a word? That’s a word, right?”
We asked for a little more info on the film. “Well uh…MACHETE kicks ass,” he laughed. “It is a culmination of DESPERADO, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO…there’s even a little bit of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN in there. I think it’s gonna be one of his best. And I’m not just saying that cause I’m the lead, it’s just a great movie. I think everybody’s gonna walk away from that movie with some opinion. It’s a battle for our border, you know? People are really serious about what’s going on with the border, and it shows the negative side of both sides. Not just, you know, we want everybody to cross, or we don’t want anybody to cross. It shows the negative side of both sides. Everybody’s gonna be pissed off.”
The cast of this film is pretty fucking awesome. It’s got big name stars like Jessica Alba, Rose McGowan, Michelle Rodriguez (who seems to be in everything these days) and the legendary Robert De Niro. It’s also got some fantastically kitchy celebs like Lindsey Lohan (never thought you’d see her in a film with De Niro, did you?) Don Johnson and…wait for it…Steven Seagal. Trejo said, “You know, when I first saw Robert De Niro on the set, he came up and his first words to me were, ‘Don’t make me like this, homes.’ You know, that was my line in HEAT. And I kind of laughed and he said, ‘Man, Danny, I’m really proud of you. You’re the lead. This is it, this is you.’ And I looked him right in the eyes and I said, ‘Can I get some coffee, Mr. De Niro?’” he laughed. “You know, cause that’s the guy. I couldn’t believe that Robert got De Niro. And then Jessica Alba, you know? And Lindsay Lohan. And Michelle Rodriguez, and Jeff Fahey, and Steven Seagal, and Cheech Marin. It just goes on and on. It was really hard like not just giggling, you know? I mean, when you’re working, just not giggling. You know, like come on, grow up. But it was amazing, and that cast was amazing. The cast for PREDATORS, I mean we got Laurence Fishburne. We have THE MATRIX in there. It’s unbelievable. Robert just has people that gravitate toward him. They wanna work with him. So any actor that works with him knows it’s gonna be an unbelievable cast because all the A-list wants to work with him.”
Trejo has noticed a rather strange pattern with his character names in Rodriguez films. “My name’s Cuchillo in this (PREDATORS), right? For some reason Robert always gives me these sharp objects. I was Navajas in DESPERADO, I was Razor Charlie in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, I was Cuchillo in this. And then I was Machete. So he always gives me sharp objects.”
He joked about the possibility of MACHETE becoming a franchise. “We want MACHETE, MACHETE KILLS, and MACHETE KILLS AGAIN, he laughed. “That’s mine and Robert’s standards, you know? Every time I text him, he’ll text me back, MACHETE 2, coming up.”
MACHETE is currently in post-production.