Danny Trejo is celebrating his 55th anniversary of being "clean and sober" this week.
"I’m 55 years clean and sober today by the grace of God! I’ve done this one day at a time, and for anyone out there struggling YOU CAN TOO!" he captioned a photo of himself smiling with a huge grin that he posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
Trejo, 79, has been open with his struggles with addiction in the past. He described his upbringing in Los Angeles during the Jan. 23 episode of PBS' "Finding Your Roots."
"The biggest problem that I had growing up was that in my family, all the men did kind of construction work and they were always complaining about their work. And they were always angry," he told the show's host, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The actor said that while he was never close with his father, he bonded quickly with one of his uncles.
"My uncle Gilbert, who was for lack of a better word a drug dealer, he never complained so I kind of gravitated towards that," Trejo said.
By age 7, Trejo said he was dealing drugs, and by age 12 he was using heroin and committing robberies as a member of a gang.
He told Variety in 2019 he spent about a decade in and out of prison, and he said something clicked for him while he was serving time at California's San Quentin State Prison and a former inmate came to talk about sobriety.
"That guy saved my life," Trejo said. "He said, 'Why don’t you join us? Before you do anything, just join us. Give it a try. What do you have to lose?' It was kind of like an awakening. So when I got out of the joint, I went back to meetings."
Once Trejo was sober, he started working as a drug counselor, he said on "Finding Your Roots." And in 1984, an actor Trejo was sponsoring was worried he would relapse on the set of a Hollywood film, so Trejo decided to visit him.
While on the set, Trejo was asked to be an extra — sparking his acting career. "By the grace of God my whole life changed," he recalled of the moment.
