From Mr Blonde to Thelma and Louise: Michael Madsen's five best films

Telegraph

14 hours ago

'Listen kid, I'm not gonna bull___ you, all right? I don't give a good f___ what you know, or don't know, but I'm gonna torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information. It's amusing, to me, to torture a cop. You can say anything you want cause I've heard it all before. All you can do is pray for a quick death, which you ain't gonna get.'
When Michael Madsen's psychotic Mr Blonde prepared to commit unspeakable acts to Marvin Nash, the unfortunate police officer in Quentin Tarantino's seminal debut picture Reservoir Dogs, he chose the otherwise innocuous sounds of Stealers Wheel's Stuck In The Middle With You to soundtrack his nefarious deeds, which included, most notoriously of all, severing Marvin's ear.
The scene was hard to watch and uncompromisingly grim in its brutality but – thanks to a combination of Tarantino's razor-sharp dialogue and Madsen's terrifying yet charismatic performance – became one of the most iconic cinematic moments in the Nineties. It is not going too far to suggest that it was the defining scene in a seminal film, and, without it, Tarantino would not have had the career that he has today.
Certainly, neither would Madsen, who has died of cardiac arrest at the age of 67. When he took the role of Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs in 1992, he was a jobbing actor who had worked in solid but unspectacular parts since his debut as a policeman in John Badham's cautionary tale War Games in 1983. (His sister Virginia is also an actress.)
He had worked at Chicago's acclaimed Steppenwolf theatre, where John Malkovich had served as a mentor to him, and many of his early roles capitalised on a certain strutting, good-looking quality that he possessed, that could either be harnessed in sympathetic roles or villainous ones.
He might have had a bigger break early on if his villainous part in John Dahl's modern-day noir Kill Me Again had been seen by wider audiences – alas, the pairing of Val Kilmer and his future wife Joanne Whalley was not a successful one at the box office – but instead he had to content himself with a small role in Oliver Stone's Doors biopic as Tom Baker, an actor friend of Jim Morrison's (once again acting opposite Kilmer) and a larger one in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise in which he played Jimmy, the decent but vaguely insubstantial boyfriend of Susan Sarandon's Louise.
If any casting director had been watching what he had been doing up to this point, they might have predicted that Madsen was bound for the kind of low-level character parts that countless Hollywood actors had been destined for over the years, and that he should count himself grateful for the work.
Mr Blonde changed all that. In 2016, Madsen recalled his initial meeting with Tarantino, saying to The Independent that 'I had never met Quentin before I walked in the room at the 20th Century Fox lot and he was standing there with his arms folded, Harvey [Weinstein] sitting on the couch in bare feet.'
While the screenplay for Reservoir Dogs was a sufficiently hot property for the film's most famous name Harvey Keitel to agree to talk the leading role of Mr White for virtually no money – and for James Woods to fire his agent because the script wasn't passed onto to him – Madsen initially demurred at the idea of playing the most obviously villainous role in the picture because he was interested in the more weaselly part of Mr Pink, later played by Steve Buscemi. His rationale was that Pink had more lines and more screen time opposite his idol Keitel, and would have given him greater exposure as an actor.
The untested Tarantino and the savvier Weinstein persuaded him otherwise, however, and Madsen agreed to take the role that turned him from an unexceptional jobbing actor into a household name. It also established a working relationship with Tarantino that lasted from the release of Reservoir Dogs until the director's most recent picture, 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; he acted in five of Tarantino's nine films to date, making him the filmmaker's second most prolific collaborator after Samuel L Jackson.
The two men would have reteamed almost immediately, as Madsen was Tarantino's first choice for the part of the over-the-hill hitman Vincent Vega in his follow-up picture Pulp Fiction, but the actor, flush with the success and profile that the earlier film had given him, instead took what he thought would be the lucrative role of Virgil Earp, brother of the lawman Wyatt, in Lawrence Kasdan's Kevin Costner-starring biopic.
It was a conspicuously poor decision, allowing John Travolta a career resurgence, and Madsen never again had such a showy role in any of Tarantino's films. The filmmaker had already tried to cast him in the lead part of the psychotic killer Mickey Knox in Natural Born Killers (''Oliver Stone wanted me, but the studios offered him an extra $20m to cast Woody Harrelson', Madsen complained to the Guardian in 2004) and the sense that the actor was being unduly picky led to a rift between him and Tarantino that was not healed for nearly a decade. It was not until the script for Kill Bill was nearly finished that the director decided that Madsen would be the ideal casting for the part of Budd, the eponymous Bill's washed-up brother.
It was not, in truth, the most interesting role in the film, but Madsen was grateful for the work, saying that 'I'm pretty sure we're going to make more pictures together. I know he's walking around with, like, four, five screenplays in his mind, so I just gotta hang in there. Quentin's the only one that's ever going to give me a job.' When he said this to the Guardian, he was speaking after a largely fallow decade.
There had been a couple of decent pictures, such as the absurd creature feature Species and a good role in the Depp-Pacino gangster drama Donnie Brasco, but Madsen seemed fixated on taking parts for the money. How else to explain his appearing in the lamentable Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home or straight-to-video dross like The Alternate? It spoke volumes about his career decline that he chose to appear in the worst James Bond film, Die Another Day, as a CIA agent, and phoned in a bored, lackadaisical performance that suggested that he had long since fallen out of love with acting.
It was Budd, and Tarantino, that revived his interest. His performance in both the Kill Bill films was a reminder to audiences and casting agents alike that Madsen could still be a potent presence on screen. Yet he continued to take any old nonsense for money, saying wryly that 'I'm just an actor. I'm a father, I've got seven children. I'm married, I've been married 20 years. When I'm not making a movie, I'm home, in pyjamas, watching The Rifleman on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.'
When Tarantino asked him to appear in pictures such as The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he was happy to oblige, but otherwise Madsen was equally content to appear in parts that didn't seriously stretch him or his talent. Instead, he would turn up, do his thing (often looking increasingly tired), cash his pay cheque and move on.
Rumours of bad behaviour dogged him; he commented that 'I sure as hell had my rabble-rousing days, but sooner or later you have to get over that and move on.' He had to deal with various personal difficulties including the death of his son Hudson by suicide in 2022, an arrest the same year for trespassing and rumours of spousal abuse last year. Yet he never pretended to be a saint.
'Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man,' he said in 2004. 'I'm a bit of a throwback to the days of black and white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic – they gave rise to a type of anti-hero that maybe I suit better.' He was correct; how he would have thrived in the old days of Hollywood, where he could have alternated between B-movies and classics with aplomb.
It is a great shame that Madsen's death means that the long-mooted Vega Brothers film, that would have united Travolta's Vincent Vega with Madsen playing his sibling Vic, will now never come to fruition, not least because his co-star Travolta could have done with a hit as well. And undoubtedly the sheer rubbish that the actor wasted his time on means that he will never be regarded as a talent in the way that he should have been.
Yet it takes an especial kind of skill to combine charm, charisma, menace and a goofy humour in the way that Madsen did, and even if his premature death deprives us of many of the roles that we might otherwise have had – including in Tarantino's tenth and supposedly final picture – we should be grateful for what we have. Mr Blonde notoriously declared 'Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?' Madsen's career proved that, sometimes, bite and bark could go together, to unforgettable effect.
Michael Madsen's five greatest roles
1. Jimmy Lennox, Thelma and Louise (1991)
For a film that has sometimes been accused of misandry, it's notable that two of the most sympathetic roles are played by men, in the form of Harvey Keitel's understanding detective and Madsen's musician boyfriend of Susan Sarandon's Louise. Madsen isn't in the picture all that much, but when he's on screen he manages to be charming, charismatic and slightly infuriating, elegantly suggesting precisely what Louise has to lose as well as what she's running away from.
2. Mr Blonde, Reservoir Dogs (1993)
It is impossible to imagine any other actor playing the psychotic and voluble Mr Blonde; testament not only to Madsen's superb work in the part, but also the way that he inhabits a vividly drawn and hugely unpleasant character and makes him endlessly compelling whenever he's on screen. The little dance he does while torturing the policeman as 'Stuck In The Middle With You' plays remains one of cinema's greatest, grimmest moments.
3. Press Lennox, Species (1995)
The success of Reservoir Dogs led to Madsen being offered a range of roles, of which his quasi-action hero in Roger Donaldson's enjoyably loopy alien-sex sci-fi thriller is one of his most enjoyable. As black ops mercenary Press Lennox, he conveys an easy, slightly lazy charm that combines all the usual running and shooting schtick with an enjoyable sense of bewilderment at the situation that he and his illustrious co-stars (Ben Kingsley, Forest Whitaker and Alfred Molina) have found themselves in, as they are alternately seduced and destroyed by Natasha Henstridge's shape-shifting alien seductress.
4. Budd, Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2 (2003/2004)
After Tarantino and Madsen patched up their differences and began working together again, the role of Budd, one of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, was specifically written with the actor in mind. Perhaps in a slightly mocking nod to the way that Madsen's circumstances had declined over the previous decade, Budd – unlike the other former members of the DVAS – is a pathetic has-been who is living in a trailer when Uma Thurman's fiery Beatrix Kiddo comes on her roaring rampage of revenge. Madsen elegantly manages to suggest that this once-deadly figure is now a pathetic has-been, but still capable of danger and fire if he's pushed far enough.
5. Michael Madsen, Being Michael Madsen (2007)
By this late stage in his career, Madsen was mainly reduced to hoping that Tarantino would pick up the telephone and offer him a role, but that doesn't mean that all his work was uninteresting. Pick of the bunch is Michael Mongillo's wry mockumentary in which Madsen takes on a self-parodying lead role as a faded movie star who is beset by intrusive journalists and paparazzi alike. Madsen plays himself in suitably broad and cheesy fashion, to hilarious effect, and he's backed up by a cast that includes his sister Virginia, his Kill Bill co-star David Carradine and the great character actor Harry Dean Stanton.