American Badass: Michael Madsen (1957-2025) | Tributes

It is always a dangerous thing to overtly compare a contemporary movie star to a past screen icon. That said, to call the late Michael Madsen, who passed on July 3 from cardiac arrest at the age of 67, the contemporary equivalent of the likes of Robert Mitchum is a comparison that I suspect neither would have minded too much. (Their careers even crossed paths once when both appeared in the 1988 mega-miniseries “War and Remembrance,” though they did not share the same scene at any point.) Both were actors who were celebrated for their tough guy personas, but who were also more than capable of convincingly demonstrating softer and more vulnerable sides when necessary. Both took a workman-like approach to their respective careers that saw them appearing in lot of projects over the years, some of them classics, and many of them not so much. Perhaps most significantly, they both had a palpable presence that grabbed the attention of viewers and let them know that there was now a distinct possibility that something genuinely interesting might be happening, no matter how dire the rest of the film might be.

Just a few weeks ago, I happened to be hosting a screening of the 1983 hit “WarGames,” which also happened to be the first notable film role that Madsen landed after growing up in Chicago and working with the famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. He appears right at the beginning as one of the two missile launch controllers whose failure to act properly during a surprise attack drill is part of the impetus to put them all under computer control instead. In many cases, seeing a soon-to-be-famous face in an early and unheralded role is often a cause for amusement, but, in his few moments on screen here, he takes a character that presumably had little shading in the screenplay and makes something out of him. He’s the first indication that this is going to be more than an empty-headed high-concept teen film.

Over the next few years, he would appear in a number of supporting roles on both the big and small screens, including episodes of “Miami Vice,” “Crime Story” and “Tour of Duty” and the films “The Natural” (1984), “Racing with the Moon” (1984), “Iguana” (1988), “Kill Me Again” (1989) and “The Doors” (1991), often in roles that demonstrated his tough guy bona fides, and while these parts may not have done much for him in terms of name recognition (his ferocious turn in the neo-noir “Kill Me Again” might have if it had received a proper release), he was beginning to attract some degree of notice and his next two movies would prove to be his big breakthrough. In “Thelma & Louise” (1991), he turns up for a few scenes as Susan Sarandon’s on-again/off-again musician boyfriend who unexpectedly reappears after she and Geena Davis have gone on the lam. While most of the male characters in that film are some degree of awful, his character is presented as something a bit different—although undeniably flawed in many ways, you get the sense of someone who is at least trying to be a better person and why Sarandon’s character would have a connection with him. Madsen is able to suggest all of this quickly, efficiently and deftly, playing against his bad ass aura and indeed, the motel encounter between him and Sarandon continues to be one of the film’s most fascinating sequences.

When that film became an unexpected hit, Madsen finally began to be noticed by moviegoers but it would be in the next year that he would land himself a place in the annals of cinema history with his appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s galvanizing debut feature, “Reservoir Dogs.” When we first see his character, Mr. Blonde, during the film’s opening diner scene, he seems affable enough but as the story of a heist that goes sideways in a hail of bullets and betrayal progresses, we hear (but wisely don’t see) about how he apparently went rogue and shot a number of bystanders during the robbery. And yet, when he finally shows up at the rendezvous point, he seems so cool and collected that it is hard to reconcile him with the gun-happy guy we have heard about, even though he has shown up with a cop that he has kidnapped in order to get information about who betrayed them. By the time the other characters take off to hide to various getaway cars and leave him in charge of the cop, we have been distracted enough by his cool guy aura to let our guard down, and it is at that point, with the flick of a straight razor and a Stealers Wheel needle drop, that he shuffles his way into immortality with a torture scene that is still shocking to watch more than three decades later. What makes the scene so chilling, even more so than the actual brutality, is the effortless way in which Madsen flips the switch in his character to move from the kind of cool cat that someone like Mitchum or Steve McQueen might have once embodied into something altogether more terrifying.

Although “Reservoir Dogs” was not a big hit at the box office, at least in its initial run, it was certainly one of the most talked-about films of 1992, and since he was the focus of the most discussed and debated part of the film, Madsen saw his career take off as well. He portrayed Dolly Parton’s ex-boyfriend in the lukewarm rom-com “Straight Talk” (1992), the foster dad of the kid trying to save an ailing killer whale in “Free Willy” (1993) and “Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home” (1995) and Virgil Earp in “Wyatt Earp” (1994), a role that he reportedly accepted over that of Vincent Vega in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994). He turned up as one of a group recruited to try to track down a sexy alien-human hybrid before she can mate in the bizarre sexploitation/horror hybrid “Species” (1995) and when that proved to be a hit, he later appeared in the inevitable, if perfunctory, “Species II” (1998). There were a number of smaller movies as well that he turned up in as well, mostly going direct-to-video where his presence would help draw in viewers.

Most of these films were not particularly good but you can’t really fault Madsen for selecting them—after years of struggling to make it as an actor, it makes sense that he would take a lot of what was being offered, even if many of them were just for the money. That said, even in the shoddiest of them, that presence of his was still magnetic enough to hold one’s interest during the flimsiest of projects (and few things on Earth are flimsier than “Species II”) and when he happened upon one that he really connected with, the results could be extraordinary. In 1994, he appeared in “The Getaway,” an adaptation of the Jim Thompson noir-classic that had previously been filmed in 1972 by Sam Peckinpah with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw and which was now starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger under the guidance of Roger Donaldson. The one aspect of it that does work is Madsen’s performance as Rudy, the one-time cohort of the central couple who goes off in bloody pursuit of them after his attempt to betray them following a robbery goes wrong. Although the role is essentially a revamp of his “Dogs” character, he not only proves to be a much more compelling presence than Al Lettieri had been in the original but ends up blowing away the nominal stars as well—the bizarre relationship that he establishes with Jennifer Tilly, playing a woman who develops an attraction to him after he takes her and her husband hostage, is so darkly amusing and entertaining despite its troubling nature that you’ll wish that the film had focused entirely on them.

Although many of the reviews of Mike Newell’s mob drama “Donnie Brasco” (1997) would focus on the performances by Johnny Depp, playing an FBI agent who infiltrated the feared Bonanno crime family in the 1970s, and Al Pacino as the aging gangster who unknowingly takes the new guy under his wing, Madsen proved to be strong and effective in the key supporting role as a rival member of the crew who competes with Pacino’s character for the loyalty of the newcomer, not realizing who he really is. He turned up as an NSA operative in the James Bond epic “Die Another Day” (2002) and also appeared in oddities ranging from the strange French Western “Blueberry” (2004) to “Scary Movie 4” (2006), in which he enacted a riff on “War of the Worlds” (2005) to Uwe Boll’s “Bloodrayne” (2005), which might be the silliest thing that he ever appeared in—at least which actually played in theaters—but even in that, he was still up there plugging along even though he must have been at least somewhat embarrassed by the material he was working with there.

While he was constantly working over the years, many of these projects would not actually play on screens, instead premiering on cable or going direct to video. Over the last half of his career, the most notable roles that he would have would be in projects that would reunite him with Tarantino. In the “Kill Bill” films, he played Budd, one of the former compatriots of the super-deadly assassin known as The Bride (Uma Thurman) whom she has marked for death after they betrayed her on the orders of their leader (David Carradine). In “The Hateful Eight” (2015), he had perhaps his last really meaty role as one of the characters who holes up at a remote haberdashery during a blizzard in a film that starts as a Western and eventually becomes a locked-room mystery of sorts. He also had a brief bit in “Once Upon a Time. . .in Hollywood” (2009) as one of the stars of the TV Western “Bounty Law” that may not have amounted to too much screen time, but which was entertaining, nevertheless.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the non-Tarantino films that he did during this time was “Boarding Gate,” a head-spinning 2007 thriller from France written and directed by Olivier Assayas. In it, he plays an underworld kingpin whose plans to retire from the business of crime once and for all wind up falling apart when he winds up crossing paths with a woman (Asia Argento), with whom he shares a particularly tangled and emotionally fraught personal and professional past. Although the combination of their respective personas—his being laid-back, coiled and ready to strike and hers as a borderline feral wild child—would seem to be a mismatch, it proves to be strangely fascinating and during the film’s big centerpiece scene, in which each tries to push the other’s buttons using everything from past betrayals to hints of sexual perversion, they give viewers an emotional high-wire act that is genuinely amazing to behold.

As noted, Michael Madsen worked a lot—according to IMDb, he appeared in no less than 328 different projects over the years with another 18 listed as upcoming. He was a guy who clearly loved what he did and relished the opportunity to be able to do it, regardless of the circumstances. Yes, there is not a single tribute or testimonial to him that will not lead off by mentioning his work in “Reservoir Dogs” and that is understandable but, as I hope this piece has suggested, he did fine and often memorable work in a number of other projects as well.

Don’t miss this wonderful piece from Roger Ebert in 2012: “Virginia, Michael & Elaine Madsen: From Chicago to Their Dreams”

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