' ' Cinema Romantico: In Memoriam: Michael Madsen

Wednesday, July 09, 2025

In Memoriam: Michael Madsen


Michael Madsen had already been on the Hollywood scene for a decade when he figuratively burst onto it in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992’s indie cult classic “Reservoir Dogs” as Mr. Blonde, one of several code-named crooks in a jewelry heist gone wrong. In his most memorable scene, Mr. Blonde gruesomely tortures a cop with a straight razor while Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays in the background. It would have been a great moment for any actor, but Madsen made it indelible. He shimmies to that 70s hit, dancing like no one’s watching except for the guy who’s ear he’s about to slice off, as nonchalantly as he slurps a fast-food shake, a magnetic psychopath, doing as much as anyone to establish Tarantino’s career of straddling the line between sadism and swagger.

In his obituary for Madsen, who died on July 3rd at 67 from cardiac arrest, Glenn Kenny compared him to Lee Marvin while Peter Sobczynski suggested Robert Mitchum and Alex Williams of The New York Times analogized his air as “a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone.” Yet, even if Madsen was born in Chicago rather than the Deep South, in his unmistakable cool, pompadour, and 6'0" height, I always thought of him as having something like the career the 6'0", pompadoured, unmistakably cool Elvis Presley would have wanted had he not been eternally typecast by Col. Tom Parker. Then again, despite successfully playing something other than villains both before and after “Reservoir Dogs,” in “Thelma & Louise” and “Free Willy,” Madsen wound up typecast too. “I’ve made 145 films,” he told The Malibu Times in 2009, “and the only film that anyone ever really wants to talk about is ‘Reservoir Dogs.’” Many of those 145 films, and he wound up making far more than even that, are ones you’ve never heard of, that I’ve never heard of, that he was barely in. “Some of them I’m only in for 10 minutes,” he would tell The Independent in 2016, “but they bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun.” That’s an evocatively grim diagnosis of the industry beyond the searchlights.

Despite a brief apprenticeship with John Malkovich at Steppenwolf Theatre, Madsen was a movie actor, not a stage actor, by which I mean he had a sense of presence, of how to exist on camera, of how to maximize the camera’s effect. The problem with such a style is that you tend to need a director who knows what they’re doing and when you’re trapped in direct-to-DVD dreck, you usually don’t. But it’s why he and Tarantino made such a formidable team. And if Q.T. harnessed Madsen’s cool in “Reservoir Dogs,” he turned that cool on its head a dozen years later in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” when he deployed the actor as Budd, one-time assassin turned hard up strip club bouncer. The moment when one of the dancers, Rocket, orders Budd to clean up an overflowing toilet could have been cheap comedy, but Madsen renders it truly heartbreaking: “Ok, Rocket,” he says in the voice of a man who knows where he stands on the ladder of life, “I’ll clean it up.” You understand why Uma Thurman’s Bride might underestimate him.

Madsen was always good with Tarantino, but he might never have been better than he was in Mike Newell’s 1997 mob drama “Donnie Brasco.” He was second banana to Al Pacino and Johnny Depp – indeed, in 2004 Madsen told The Guardian that those two “got all the money” – but his role as Sonny Black was crucial. In her original NYT review, Janet Maslin compliments Madsen’s turn but, tellingly, limits that praise to one parenthetical – “(just right as an imposing new boss)” – in a way that I can only assume would have caused Madsen a wistful laugh. And though Madsen is imposing, he makes Sonny Black so much more, existing somewhere between Mr. Blonde and Budd, not the littlest fish by any means but also not the biggest fish, bitterly convinced he deserves more. Sonny Black probably didn’t, but onscreen, Michael Madsen did.