You can be an actor who stars in more than 200 movies in your career, with parts ranging from leads to glorified cameos, and yet it’s just one film that people associate with your name for the rest of your natural-born life. And occasionally, the role you’re lucky enough to get in that movie is so well-suited to your skill set that it levels you up from “Oh, that guy!” to (in)famous to damn near iconic.
We think you know the movie we’re taking about when it comes to the late, great Michael Madsen, who was found dead today in his home in Malibu at the age of 67. The movie, and the role, and the specific scene. Don’t get too attached to that ear, Officer Nash.
Say Madsen’s name — or just say his character’s handle, “Mr. Blonde” — and this appendage-removal sequence is the first thing most people think of. It’s one of the reasons the film generated such controversy when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, signaling not just the official beginning of Quentin Tarantino‘s career but a whole new era in American independent filmmaking. And a big part of the scene’s effectiveness in showcasing the blend of ha-ha–bang-bang that would soon come to be called Tarantino-esque is Madsen’s take on it. Watch the way he jauntily dances to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You,” boot-scooting away like it was Saturday night at Gilley’s. Then, after Madsen gives the cop he’s tied up a quick jab with a straight-razor, he goes mad dog on him. Even though the most violent part technically happens offscreen, the noises you hear make you feel like you’ve witnessed the act firsthand. “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” he asks afterward, staring at the severed ear with one part curiosity, six parts cold-blooded bemusement.
For a lot of fans of Reservoir Dogs, the answer was: Yes, indeed. Madsen’s resident sadist is such a key part, not to mention one of the juiciest in an ensemble rife with flinty crime-flick archetypes, that it’s amazing to learn that it wasn’t the role he wanted. According to an interview he gave The Independent in 2016, the actor went into his audition with Tarantino and Harvey Keitel, and immediately went into a sales pitch about why he was perfect for Mr. Pink. The filmmaker let him read for the part, then, according to Madsen, said, “Is that it? OK, good. You’re not Mr. Pink. You’re Mr. Blonde — and if you’re not Mr. Blonde, then you’re not in the movie.” Give the director credit. He knew a supercool psychotic killer when he saw one.
The movie made Madsen enough of a name that it transformed him from your average working actor who booked dozens of small parts in the 1980s and early 1990s — a brief role in The Natural here, a supporting turn in Thelma & Louise there — to the kind of guy you could put on an action-movie poster with a gun and use the image to sell a stock Grade-Z thriller to international territories. Madsen never made any bones about taking gigs for money; he’d admit those gigs supported his family, bought groceries and filled gas tanks. His career was prolific after Reservoir Dogs, even if his characters were what you might call variations on “Blonde with dark roots.”
But the ear-cutting scene is, for our money, not Madsen’s single standout moment in that era-defining heist movie, even if it remains the sort of bravura bit that makes you laugh through your gag-reflex spasms. No, the one we always go back to is the sequence where we officially meet Mr. Blonde, which Tarantino turns into a true star-making introduction. Not the part where he makes a finger-gun gesture at Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White in the opening, though that casually cheerful “ka-pow” becomes more chilling with every subsequent viewing. (Again, it’s the sort of tiny thing that any actor could do, and that Madsen somehow turns into a three-course meal.) Rather, it’s the verbal standoff where he and Keitel are ready to go at each other, guns-a-blazing.
“I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin Fan, aren’t you?” he says to Keitel, after the characters declare a truce. “Yeah, me too.” Tarantino understood this aspect of Madsen from the jump, and though they allegedly had a fallout after the actor turned down playing Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was the filmmaker who always knew exactly how to use Madsen’s inner Lee Marvin fan best. The burly gent from Chicago, whose firefighter dad never thought that acting was a “manly” profession (according to Michael), could play tenderhearted and paternal when he wanted to; he never shied away from reminding folks he was the dad in Free Willy. The fact that he was also a poet who published a number of books of free verse also spoke to a more creative bohemian side as well.
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But Madsen was born to be the Lee Marvin of the 1990s — the kind of laconic brute who spoke softly and carried a sharp straight-razor. When he and Tarantino patched things up and the director cast him as Budd, the ex-assassin and bouncer who’s now living in a trailer in the desert, in Kill Bill: Vol. II (2004), he gave him a handful of the movie’s most memorable sequences, from Budd getting his ass handed to him by his boss to one hell of a death scene. The conversation between him and David Carradine’s Bill, however, once again taps into that same steely, slow-and-low vibe that Marvin parlayed into an entire career, and was the he-man crown Madsen should have been the heir to.
He’s equally great in The Hateful Eight (2015), and when Madsen showed up in a blink-and-you-miss-it guest apperance in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), many filmgoers [raises hand] many have inadvertently yelped out loud, “Oh, shit, it’s Michael Madsen!” He’s a cowpoke in a 1960s Western TV show and only has a handful of lines, yet he delivers each and every syllable in the same whispery, sandpaper-y cadence he once used to ask a stone-cold criminal if he was a doggy who was gonna bark all day, or bite. Madsen had range and versatility, to be sure. No one could accuse him of being a one-trick pony. But when he had the chance to play the tough guy’s tough guy, there was no one better.
From Rolling Stone US
