10 Actors Who Played The Same Character In Completely Different Movies

10. Danny Trejo - Machete

The Character: Isador ‘Machete’ Cortez

The Movies: Machete, Machete Kills and the Spy Kids franchise

Believe it or not Uncle Machete – the tough guy with a heart of gold who saves his estranged family at the end of the first Spy Kids movie – is the very same vigilante who spent the entirety of both Machete movies committing the kind of gruesome acts of violence that earn a film an R rating.

Although the character of Machete made his big screen debut in 2001 with Spy Kids, director Robert Rodriguez actually began drafting a Machete film years earlier after casting Trejo as hitman Navajas in his 1995 film Desperado. Both director and actor never thought a film focusing on a character that Rodriguez envisioned as a “Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme” would ever see the light of day and so a more family-friendly version of the character was inserted into the Spy Kids movies.

But when Rodriguez collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on 2007’s Grindhouse and produced a fake trailer for a Machete movie, interest in Uncle Machete’s violent day job was piqued and soon enough we got to see the far more savage side of Isador Cortez in Machete and Machete Kills.