Michael Madsen, our favorite torturer Mr. Blonde, leaves us too soon

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’t give it a pasting when it played Cannes the year before. I averred that the movie rocked hard, while admitting “this is very much a French intellectual cineaste’s idea of a B thriller and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get.” The movie’s Kim Gordon cameo gave it its highbrow distance. But Madsen’s 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’t there, nor was Asia Argento, the movie’s 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’s 1992 Reservoir Dogs, playing his breakthrough role as Mr. Blonde, you’d swear he truly was the nonchalant psychopath holding that poor cop hostage. “I don’t know anything about any setup,” the cop protests, “You can torture me all you want.” Bad suggestion, dude. With icy nonchalance, Madsen responds, “Torture you, that’s a good…that’s a good idea. I like that one.”  Man. Pro tip, people: don’t make recommendations to this guy, even sarcastically, when he’s got you tied to a chair. 

Madsen, who died on July 3 from cardiac arrest, was arguably our greatest on-screen “man you don’t want to mess with” since Lee Marvin. (Marvin is, as we all remember, referenced in the dialogue of Tarantino’s 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 — 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’s Steppenwolf Theater and had none other than John Malkovich as a mentor. He hit Hollywood in the early ‘80s and did journeyman-style work. He had a small role in Monte Hellman’s gonzo quasi-pirate movie Iguana (1988); Hellman would eventually serve as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs. Director John Dahl saw Madsen’s 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’s AM radio hit “Stuck in the Middle With You.” I’m not sure if even Lee Marvin could have pulled that off. The dancing actually made Mr. Blonde even more scary.

It’s 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’s 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’s 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’s Donnie Brasco. 

But the early 2000s saw him doing an unusual amount of work even for a gigging character actor, which he’d become. “What people don’t always understand,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2016, “is that I established a certain lifestyle for my family back in the days of Species and Mulholland Falls and The Getaway. I wasn’t about to move my six kids into a trailer park. So when people offered me work, it wasn’t always the best, but I had to buy groceries and I had to put gas in the car.” 

But groceries and gas weren’t 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’t know. It’s 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’s monumental Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. It certainly wasn’t intended as a capper to his career — 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’s not an inapt hat-tip by any stretch. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ 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.