Danny Trejo plays the most badass character you can conceive in "Machete Kills," the raunchy action-comedy by Robert Rodriguez, who is actually Trejo's second cousin.

Trejo is a badass off-screen as well. He has been to prison and has done all the possible movie star bad boy clichés you can imagine. So the story of how he broke into acting is quite surprising..

In an interview with The Vulture, he narrates: "I was there as a drug counselor! I was helping one of the PAs, who called and said he was having a lot of problems. You have to remember, this was 1985, and cocaine had really just gone crazy on film sets. He was an addict and he was having a tough time trying to stay clean on a film set, so I went down there. And I ran into a good friend of mine named Eddie Bunker, one of the greatest crime writers ever. If you want to read a really good book, read his book Education of a Felon. So Eddie just offered me a job training Eric Roberts how to box. And the director, Andrei Konchalovsky, saw that Eric respected me, so he hired me. I've been clean now 45 years. And everything that's good that's happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else."

About meeting Clint Eastwood: "I actually met him when I was about 13 years old. My dad used to work in his building in California, back when [Eastwood] was playing Rowdy Yates on Rawhide. He used to live on Vineland and Ventura, and my dad worked in his building. And my dad had built a bar in our house, so he invited Clint Eastwood over for a drink. He and a couple of his friends came over one day. Even back then, you could tell this guy was really something. He had an unbelievable presence."

His opinion on "Machete Kills" being compared to comedy classics like "Naked Gun" and "Airplane": "Good! I'm so glad you said that, because Machete really is an action comedy. It's funny, because some of the critics said, "Oh, it's political," and they made all these serious claims about it. But it's a comedy! You don't need to try and find any literary value in it."

"Machete Kills" is slashing through theatres now.