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Perhaps you recognize Danny Trejo. If you do, then you probably saw Con Air or Heat or were once in prison. Trejo, of course, was in prison himself: he served time in San Quentin for armed robbery and drug offenses. This makes a handy story angle for reporters who are writing about films in which Trejo is playing a prisoner. Which is a lot of them.

Name a film with a prison in it, and chances are Danny Trejo was in it too: Lock Up, Con Air, Deadlock, and Penitentiary III, for example. Often, his characters are simply identified as "Prisoner" or "Prison Inmate" or "Tough Prisoner #1." He has played other characters, in other films, but all have been bad-asses: characters like "Razor Charlie" or "Uncle Machete," "Angry Client" or "Sharkey" or "Jumpy," "Hitman" or "Poacher" or "Scarface." You may know him from From Dusk Till Dawn, Point Blank, The Replacement Killers and other movies that call for gangs of mean, tough-looking bastards, of which Trejo is always the meanest and toughest-looking. Soon, you can enjoy him and his excessively tattooed body in The Salton Sea, which stars Val Kilmer, who on the scale of bad-assery is closer to Wallace Shawn than he is to Danny Trejo.

Because Danny Trejo is clearly a bad-ass. Not just in movies; every day. He was the boxing champion of San Quentin, for crying out loud! Look at him! This man could clearly kick your, my, his, and that other guy's ass all at the same time, while eating a sandwich.

You might wonder if playing so many prisoners is hard for someone who has, himself, been a real-life prisoner. Perhaps Danny Trejo creates fictional "prisons" for himself in movies because he's yet to learn how to live outside the "walls" that we all are imprisoned behind, making ourselves the jailers of our own selves.

We don't think so, though. We think the only thing he finds "hard" about playing a bad ass in the movies is not beating the jiggling crap out of the other actors, who prance around trying to act all bad-ass and who probably fake-shoot each other with their fake guns in between takes. And we think that Danny Trejo probably laughs himself silly thinking about the fact that he now gets paid oodles of money to do pretty much exactly what he used to do everyday for free. Now that's a bad-ass.