The tattoos combined with a face like chewed leather and several cavernous scars have kept him busy ever since playing thugs and cons and menacing villains, the most harrowing experience coming when he returned to San Quentin for Taylor Hackford's prison drama "Bound By Honor" (1993). ("That was some heavy s*** . . . I would get a look, and it would be like I'd never left.") Writer-director Allison Anders awarded him a much-needed furlough from prison films when she cast him as an Echo Park junkie in "Mi Vida Loca/My Crazy Life" (1994), and he sandwiched parts as Certain Doom, a dagger-throwing assassin, in "Desperado" (1995) and Razor Charlie in "From Dusk Till Dawn" (1996) for Robert Rodriguez around his role as a bank robber in Michael Mann's "Heat" (1995). Trejo's decade of coloring the background in bad guy bits had finally led to featured exposure, his most significant work to date coming as Johnny 23, the third most psychotic member of the planeload of escaped convicts, in "Con-Air" (1997). He also appeared in "The Replacement Killers" (1998), starring Mira Sorvino and Chow Yun-Fat. In 2002, Trejo reunited with Antonio Banderas and Robert Rodriguez to ilm both "Spy Kids 2: The Island Of Lost Dreams" and also appeared in the extreme action film "xXx." Also in 2002, Trejo filmed "Once Upon A Time In Mexico", a western crime feature.

Although Trejo is known for his hard-egded characters on screen, he spends his personal time with family and counseling children at several inner city schools. He uses his face as a "hook" to stop kids from doing things that could cause them to do time.