Danny Trejo was happy to play the good guy.
His son, filmmaker Gilbert Trejo, remembers being with the 82-year-old actor when his agent pitched “Pawn Shop” a few weeks before filming began. The film reportedly follows a Mexican-American store owner trying to keep the peace amid protests and escalating violence. After a career spent playing convicts and criminals, the opportunity appealed to Trejo.
“Oh, cool. I’m playing a good guy,” Gilbert recalled telling his father.
The people behind the independent project have proven more controversial. Produced by The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro’s Bonfire Legend, the pro-ICE action film has since sparked protests and questions about why a beloved entertainer, known for his support of immigrants, would participate.
Danny’s agent, Gloria Hinojosa, told IndieWire that Trejo did not personally know that Shapiro or The Daily Wire were involved when he accepted the role. Gilbert said his father thought he was playing a sympathetic character and further described his own fears that walking away from or criticizing the project could expose his father to litigation that the actor cannot afford.
When asked if Danny felt empowered to turn down work, Gilbert pointed to his prolific output. With a sprawling filmography including “Heat,” “Desperado,” “From Dusk Till Dawn,” “Spy Kids” and “Machete,” Trejo has amassed nearly 500 credits across film, television, video games and music.
“I think his IMDb attests to the fact that no, he didn’t say no,” Gilbert said. “He’s like most of us in this country. People don’t refuse to work.”
Gilbert said he saw his father almost every day but was not involved in negotiations over “Pawn Shop.” He also did not review his father’s contract for the film. Still, Trejo’s predicament echoes a question raised by IndieWire’s previous reporting: What did the people hired to make this film know before accepting the job, and what choices did they have after starting?
“Danny only learned about Ben Shapiro or the Daily Wire’s involvement a few weeks ago,” Hinojosa confirmed to IndieWire in an Oct. 13 email. “He didn’t know either of them and had never heard of them before.” Trejo’s agent also directed IndieWire to his client’s recent social media statement.
“I am a proud Mexican who has always been and always will be a supporter of my community,” Danny wrote. “I’m also obviously pro immigrant. I’m not pro ice.”
“I know where I come from and I know our struggles,” Trejo continued. “I’m an actor. My job is to tell a story.” Neither The Daily Wire nor Bonfire Legend responded to IndieWire’s request for comment on the actor’s involvement, and Hinojosa’s email response did not address the assertion that his client could not publicly criticize the film. “Pawn Shop” reportedly follows a federal immigration agent who takes refuge in a Minneapolis pawn shop amid civil unrest. Trejo plays the owner, a Mexican American military veteran.
Harvey Keitel, Henry Thomas and others also star. The film, filmed in Livingston, Montana, sparked protests and public safety complaints earlier this month. City officials temporarily suspended the production’s filming permit before reinstating it with additional restrictions, and The Daily Wire reported on October 9 that filming had ended.
A draft of the script, previously vetted by a team member and reviewed by IndieWire, includes a sequence resembling the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier this year. In these pages, a protester hits an ICE agent with her car before being shot by her partner, and the agent subsequently dies. No officers died in the actual incident, and whether Good’s car ever posed a threat to his killer, Jonathan Ross, remains largely controversial.
“No one contacted my dad and said, ‘Hey, we want to do pro-ICE propaganda,'” Gilbert said when asked about the content of the “Pawn Shop” script as he understood it.
Not recognizing the producers and not understanding the film are different things, of course. And neither Hinojosa nor Gilbert clarified for IndieWire what was in the script Danny received or when he learned more about his overall portrayal of ICE. “Pawn Shop” wasn’t his first Daily Wire job, either.
Trejo previously voiced a character in Adam Carolla’s DailyWire+ animated comedy “Mr. Birchum,” whose December 2023 announcement also named Bonfire Legend’s Dallas Sonnier as producer and Shapiro as executive producer. Gilbert described this assignment as a simple acquaintance asking his father to dub a cartoon, without Danny actually appreciating the undertakings involved.
Gilbert doubted his father recognized Shapiro walking around the set. He also believes he alerted Hinojosa, Danny’s agent for decades, to the political implications of the partnership amid the “Pawn Shop” controversy. He said his reaction suggested the team didn’t fully understand them.
“It’s really hard to believe, when you know everything that’s going on online, that other people don’t know about it,” Gilbert said, describing his father’s attention to living closer to home. For Danny, Hollywood is part of the local economy: a place where one can earn a living through assignments that often follow a familiar daily routine and regular annual cycle.
“He treats Hollywood like it’s a factory. It’s a factory that makes movies,” Gilbert said. “My father thinks of Hollywood as Detroit.”
Trejo’s challenge for much of his career has been getting more roles, and now there are fewer to go around. A formerly incarcerated Mexican-American actor, Danny built his legacy on roles that often reduced the men of his past to a menace. “And he is one of the few Mexican men, especially of his generation, who was able to turn his status as a convict, a gangster, inmate number three, inmate number four, into good will and good faith,” Gilbert said.
Acting gave Danny a wider audience for the community work he had been doing for years, his son said. In prisons, schools and recovery meetings, people first recognize a Trejo character, then listen to his own story. On the day of our interview, Gilbert said, Danny recorded a voiceover and handed out socks to the homeless. He keeps them in his car just for this purpose.
“He feels like this career was given to him to be able to help people, so he wants to continue working,” Gilbert said. “He just wants to work. That’s what he wants to do.”
Trejo’s financial problems are public knowledge. After filing for personal Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2023, a judge approved a five-year plan to pay off about $3 million in tax debts, including through the sale of one of his two Los Angeles homes, Bloomberg Law reported. His restaurant business was not bankrupt, but Trejo said in a court filing that about 90 percent of his revenue for the tax years in question came from actors. The Hollywood strikes further disrupted these cash flows.
The provisional closure of the file in April 2025 does not establish its remaining debt or the funds available today. IndieWire has reached out to its bankruptcy attorney, Jeffrey S. Shinbrot, for clarification. Gilbert, however, fears that his father cannot afford a legal battle. “It’s like I’m Tom Cruise, sure, whatever,” he said. “You know what I mean? But if I’m a hard-working 82-year-old Mexican-American, that’s not the case.”
IndieWire has not reviewed Trejo’s contract and cannot establish what consequences he might have faced had he walked away from “Pawn Shop.” SAG-AFTRA previously told IndieWire that productions should provide artists with enough information to make informed decisions.
“Misleading an artist about their role can undermine the meeting of minds needed to enter into a binding contract,” a spokesperson said. (The union did not respond prior to publication to additional questions about Trejo’s situation or the production’s current signatory status.)
An anonymous member of the “Pawn Shop” team interviewed as part of our previous investigation said they agreed to what was described only as a “fun action movie” without also knowing its connection to The Daily Wire or Shapiro. The worker ultimately left the shoot for political and security reasons.
Contacted again after the claims about Trejo became public, the commenter remained skeptical that the main players could have been so misinformed. They pointed out that, in the version of the script they saw, Trejo’s character “ultimately helped the ICE agent,” but they also had no direct knowledge of the actor’s negotiations and did not stick around for most of the filming.
“I don’t want to discredit what he says and I would like to believe it is the truth,” they said.
Speaking out brought its share of complications for Gilbert, who wanted to explain his father’s position without making it difficult for him. His initial explanation was intended for a smaller audience. On October 10, he posted a Close Friends Instagram story describing his father as “handcuffed to this stupid project.” It circulated in the press and Gilbert said he would have worded it differently if he had expected his comments to be widely shared.
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