Recently, Danny Trejo hosted the TMZ Brunch Bus through Hollywood, hanging out with the tour’s DJ and stopping at his own businesses, Trejo’s Coffee & Donuts and Trejo’s Tacos.
He was telling the passengers about taking a low-budget movie as a favor to a director who needed a name to get financing.
“Everything good that has happened to me has happened as a direct result of helping someone else,” he told the crowd.
Then, a woman leaned over and told him that his sister, Marlene, was her mother.
“Are you kidding?” Trejo said.
Someone on the bus caught the exchange and announced it to everyone else. “That’s his niece. That’s his niece, yo. His niece is on the bus.”
“That’s my sister’s daughter,” Trejo said. “What’s up, I have a relative on this bus.”
Trejo, 82, has said that he and Marlene were separated when he was three. It isn’t clear when they last spoke.
His family history is fractured elsewhere, too. In his 2021 memoir Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood, he wrote that his father kept him from seeing his mother, Delores, and his half-sister, Dyhan, for years. He didn’t see his mother or Dyhan again until 1965, when they read about his arrest in the newspaper and visited him in county jail.
His niece brought her own daughter along for the ride, putting three generations of that side of the family on the bus at once. Trejo thanked TMZ founder Harvey Levin for the incident.
“Harvey, I love you man,” Trejo said.
His great-niece credited her mother for the connection. “I’ve been watching TMZ since I was, like, 5 because of her,” she said.
Check out the time Trejo once saved a baby trapped in a car:
