By Glenn Kenny mliss1578
I met Michael Madsen once, in the spring of 2008. Boarding Gate, a movie he did for the great French director Olivier Assayas, was getting a New York City opening. I had been one of the few critics who didn鈥檛 give it a pasting when it played Cannes the year before. I averred that the movie rocked hard, while admitting 鈥渢his is very much a French intellectual cineaste鈥檚 idea of a B thriller and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get.鈥 The movie鈥檚 Kim Gordon cameo gave it its highbrow distance. But Madsen鈥檚 presence was an emblem of the authenticity the rest of the movie cerebrally recoiled from. He was the real deal.
And he was pretty real at the post-screening dinner Assayas had for friends and family in Manhattan. Gordon wasn鈥檛 there, nor was Asia Argento, the movie鈥檚 star. But Madsen showed up, and while he had a certain amount of time for his director, he had less patience with the guests, who he clearly regarded as parasites.
Did I say he was the real deal? Looking at and listening to him in Quentin Tarantino鈥檚 1992 Reservoir Dogs, playing his breakthrough role as Mr. Blonde, you鈥檇 swear he truly was the nonchalant psychopath holding that poor cop hostage. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know anything about any setup,鈥 the cop protests, 鈥淵ou can torture me all you want.鈥 Bad suggestion, dude. With icy nonchalance, Madsen responds, 鈥淭orture you, that鈥檚 a good鈥hat鈥檚 a good idea. I like that one.鈥 Man. Pro tip, people: don鈥檛 make recommendations to this guy, even sarcastically, when he鈥檚 got you tied to a chair.
Madsen, who died on July 3 from cardiac arrest, was arguably our greatest on-screen 鈥渕an you don鈥檛 want to mess with鈥 since Lee Marvin. (Marvin is, as we all remember, referenced in the dialogue of Tarantino鈥檚 debut.) And like Marvin, Madsen came like a genuine tough guy who just happened to end up in the movie world. (Marvin was kind of like that 鈥 he was a much-honored World-War-II hero. He caught the acting bug by chance but then studied like everyone else.)
Madsen, though, was an actor first, and a tough guy second. And in subsequent years his actions as a real-life would-be tough guy were inopportune and then deplorable, alas. But he was raised in the arts. His mom was a filmmaker (her 1983 documentary Better Than It Has To Be won an Emmy), and his sister Virginia Madsen, four years his junior, is an honored actress herself. Michael got involved with Chicago鈥檚 Steppenwolf Theater and had none other than John Malkovich as a mentor. He hit Hollywood in the early 鈥80s and did journeyman-style work. He had a small role in Monte Hellman鈥檚 gonzo quasi-pirate movie Iguana (1988); Hellman would eventually serve as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs. Director John Dahl saw Madsen鈥檚 noir potential and cast him as a casino robber double-crossed by his girl in Kill Me Again. (His character does not take well to the double cross, obviously.) But it was in Dogs that Madsen found his most resonant voice. Not only does he torture that cop in the movie, he does so while dancing to Stealers Wheel鈥檚 AM radio hit 鈥淪tuck in the Middle With You.鈥 I鈥檓 not sure if even Lee Marvin could have pulled that off. The dancing actually made Mr. Blonde even more scary.
It鈥檚 neither fair nor accurate to say that Madsen peaked in this very early role. But Mr. Blonde is the one that all the other obit writers are pumping. To his credit, Madsen subsequently put some effort in to taking parts that would establish some distance from that character. He plays the sympathetic dad of the whale-loving kid in the animal rescue heart-tugger Free Willy. In Wyatt Earp, he plays Kevin Costner鈥檚 older brother, which meant that he had to act more mature than Kevin Costner. He could do it. He played a slew of tough cops, most memorably as part of Nick Nolte鈥檚 deputies in the underrated Mulholland Falls. In the outside-the-law department, he and Jennifer Tilly were the only two cast members of the 1994 remake of The Getaway who could have passed muster in the Peckinpah original, and he had the bearings of a made man as mob underboss Sonny Black in 1997鈥檚 Donnie Brasco.
But the early 2000s saw him doing an unusual amount of work even for a gigging character actor, which he鈥檇 become. 鈥淲hat people don鈥檛 always understand,鈥 he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2016, 鈥渋s that I established a certain lifestyle for my family back in the days of Species and Mulholland Falls and The Getaway. I wasn鈥檛 about to move my six kids into a trailer park. So when people offered me work, it wasn鈥檛 always the best, but I had to buy groceries and I had to put gas in the car.鈥
But groceries and gas weren鈥檛 his only expenses. Drink was a big issue for Madsen, and in his last years it brought him a lot of trouble. Remembering that 2007 dinner with Olivier Assayas, I recall that Madsen had a little time for his director but hardly any for the media types there. And after a few perfunctory glass-raised speeches and such, he took on the expression of a guy who would rather be drinking alone. So he split, maybe to do just that, I don鈥檛 know. It鈥檚 a matter of public record that he kept drinking. A drunken driving arrest in 2012. Court-mandated AA meeting attendance ordered in 2019. An arrest for trespassing in 2022. Just last year, an arrest for battery.
His 21st century filmography is insane: 15 films in 2009, 11 films in 2010, 10 films in 2011. Few if any of them noteworthy. His old friend Quentin Tarantino never doubted his worth, and got terrific work out of him for the two volumes of Kill Bill (2003 and 2004), the monumentally odd 70mm chamber piece The Hateful Eight (2015) and in a small but strangely moving role in 2023鈥檚 monumental Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. It certainly wasn鈥檛 intended as a capper to his career 鈥 just last year Madsen made a documentary about himself called American Badass and did promo TV appearances as if his party was just getting started, despite the fact that his pompadour now began a good three inches back from where it used to. But it鈥檚 not an inapt hat-tip by any stretch.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews鈥 new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.