Actors who had a criminal record before making it in Hollywood

“I never even dreamed of being an actor.” That’s Danny Trejo, and he said it to Yahoo Entertainment. He’d been out of prison since 1969, working as a drug counselor, when a call came from a film set in 1985.

He’s not the only one. Hollywood has its share of stars with booking records from before fame. A chain gang. A manslaughter conviction. An airport search.

Six actors follow, from a teenage vagrancy arrest in 1933 to a 1988 conviction. We stick to court records and the actors’ own accounts, and where sources disagree on details, we say so.

A week on a chain gang

Robert Mitchum left home as a teenager and rode freight trains around the country. In 1933 he was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia, and put on a chain gang. Sources place his age between 14 and 16.

By his own account, he escaped after about a week, with infected wounds from the manacles. He made his way to his family in Delaware.

A few years later, his sister Julie talked him into joining a Long Beach theater group, and he made his stage debut in August 1937. His famous 1948 marijuana arrest came later, in the middle of his career.

The book of plays

Charles S. Dutton pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1967, after a fight in which a man died. He was a teenager. Later came a weapons charge, and more prison time.

In solitary, he read a book of plays a girlfriend had mailed him, including Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence.” He’d never seen a play, per Encyclopedia.com. He asked the warden for a drama group.

“That’s where I discovered acting, that’s where I discovered the theatre … in prison,” he has said in an interview.

He was paroled on August 20, 1976. Then Towson State. Then a master’s from Yale. He received his first Tony nomination in 1985 for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”

Inmate #1

Danny Trejo spent most of the 1960s in California prisons: San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad. He was a boxing champion in several of them, and took part in a prison riot in 1968 that landed him in solitary.

He walked out in 1969. Then came Narcotics Anonymous and years as a drug counselor.

In 1985, a client on the set of “Runaway Train” asked for help staying clean. Trejo went. The screenwriter, Edward Bunker, had also served time in San Quentin, and he recognized him. Bunker asked him to train actor Eric Roberts to box.

The part paid $320 a day.

A joke about a bomb

September 21, 1970. Bill Murray’s 20th birthday. At O’Hare Airport, waiting to fly back to college in Denver, he joked about a bomb in his luggage. A ticket agent overheard.

Police searched the bag. They found no bomb. They found five two-pound bricks of marijuana. He got five years of probation and dropped out of Regis College.

Later, he said he’d “lost his direction in life,” per a timeline citing his Charlie Rose interview. His brother Brian pointed him to Second City. In 2007, Regis gave him an honorary degree.

Image Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.

650 grams

October 2, 1978. Kalamazoo/Battle Creek airport. Tim Allen was arrested with more than 650 grams of cocaine, weeks after Michigan passed a law that gave life without parole for that amount.

He pleaded guilty and gave authorities names. That moved his case to federal court. He was sentenced to three to seven years, served two years and four months, and spent time in a federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota.

Before sentencing, he’d tried stand-up at Detroit’s Comedy Castle. After his 1981 parole, he went back to the stage at night and worked at an ad agency by day.

April 8, 1988

Mark Wahlberg was 16, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Trying to steal alcohol outside a store, he hit a man in the head with a wooden stick. Then he punched another man in the face while trying to avoid police. Both men were Vietnamese American.

He was convicted of assault and served about 45 days at the Deer Island House of Correction, per the Boston Globe.

In 2014, he applied for a pardon. The application drew sharp criticism, and in 2016 the board closed it after he didn’t respond to a letter. He said he regretted asking, but was glad the process let him meet and apologize to one of the men.

The bottom line

Trejo’s first film job paid $320 a day. Dutton was paroled in 1976 and had a Yale master’s degree by 1983.

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Actors who had a criminal record before making it in Hollywood