Danny Trejo has had an action-movie-worthy life both onscreen and off.
The prolific actor, 80, was in and out of prison before his Hollywood career. During one of his stints behind bars, he crossed paths with Charles Manson, he said.
“You have to understand, the Charles Manson that I met was not the Manson that you saw [in the news]. Because he was a little kid. He was like 5 foot 4 or 5 foot 6. He wasn’t this tough guy,” Trejo recalled while talking to The Post about his new History Channel show, “Mysteries Unearthed With Danny Trejo” (premiering Friday, Dec. 6 at 10 p.m).
Trejo, who has over 400 film and TV credits to his name, is best known for “Machete,” “Spy Kids,” “Con Air,” and shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “Sons of Anarchy.”
His Hollywood career began in the ‘80s. Before that, he spent the better part of 1956-1969 in California prisons such as San Quentin and Folsom for crimes including drug dealing and armed robbery.
The “From Dusk Till Dawn” actor said that he encountered Manson roughly around 1962 when the latter was in county jail for theft years before the1969 murder of Sharon Tate.
“When he showed up, we found out that he could hypnotize you,” Trejo explained, referring to his fellow inmates.
The “Heat” actor added, “[Manson] was in trouble with a lot of the inmates that didn’t like him. And we found out that he could hypnotize you… I said, ‘Get us loaded on marijuana.’ And so he did [hypnotize us into feeling like we were on marijuana],” he recalled.
Manson’s “family” cult was active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Manson was ultimately convicted in 1971 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, including Tate.
Trejo said about a decade after he crossed paths with Manson and saw him making headlines for “all that stuff, ‘I was like, ‘how did this guy [do that]?’”
Trejo added that his impression of Manson – who died in prison in 2017 at age 83 – was not that he was a criminal mastermind who would go on to become one of America’s most notorious killers.
“He was a twerp. He couldn’t have done that in Compton,” the actor said.
