That’s how you became leading men.”īack then, Madsen was all about being the star of things, and found unappealing the idea of being an ensemble player or even a character actor. I knew all those guys were very careful in their roles, and who they acted with or who they got killed by onscreen. “I was a huge fan of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin. “I was very affected by old films,” he explains.
He says the anecdote was indicative of his mindset at the time. In QT8, he recalls his upset at learning that he’d be killed onscreen by Tim Roth, then a British unknown he’d never heard of.
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One hundred dollars was a lot of money back then.”Īccess unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign upĪt first, Madsen had specific criteria about the kind of career he wished to have. “I don’t know where the hell he went, but I knew I was in the right place. “I asked him, ‘Do you want me to put a spare on or plug it?’, and he just handed me a $100 bill and walked away,” Madsen says. Fred Astaire came in one Christmas Eve with a flat tyre. Jack Lemmon was “always in a hurry”, he remembers. It was there that he mingled with many of the greats, pumping gas into vehicles owned by everyone from Cicely Tyson to Warren Beatty. Inspired by classes he then took with Steppenwolf co-founder John Malkovich, Madsen moved to Los Angeles in 1983, where he intermittently found work on shows such as Miami Vice while earning a living as a Beverly Hills mechanic. Madsen only discovered acting after attending a production by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company while on a date.
Adolescence saw him stealing cars and getting involved with petty criminality. He was something of a tearaway as a teenager, moving around because of his mother’s work (his parents split up when he was nine years old), and always the new kid at school. Madsen was born in Chicago to a firefighter father and a mother who worked in finance and later the arts. But the 62-year-old is also oddly under-used – too associated with direct-to-video thrillers, and too often recruited by filmmakers who believe his skills start and finish with how good he is at shooting people on screen. He also works constantly, with one of those vaguely ludicrous IMDb portfolios that features around 30 movies in post-production… even if he insists that most of them aren’t legit. As the ear-slicing Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, and later as a run of villains and anti-heroes in Kill Bill: Volumes I and 2 (2003-4), The Hateful Eight (2015) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Madsen is part of the QT furniture. If you’d exclusively watched Quentin Tarantino movies for the last 30 years, it would seem as if Madsen has never gone away. I mean, when’s the last time anybody wanted to talk to Michael Madsen?” But it can wreak havoc on you if you’re not protected. I’m not complaining, because I’ve had a great life. “I had a bad motorcycle accident and had to get my back operated on. Some, in hindsight, he should have been more careful about. Some of it was out of his control, like the Malibu fires that burned his house to the ground in 2018. “I went through some bad s***,” he recalls, his voice so gravelly that it’s as if he’s swallowed the contents of an ashtray.
I got to do a bunch of stuff in the hat, and that was great.A few years ago, Michael Madsen thought he was finished. But the funny thing was that when we started the movie, the first couple of scenes we shot were the scenes in the graveyard. He did, and I ended up doing it like that. It took me a couple of days of getting used to him seeing me like that, and I was just hoping that he would eventually agree with me. He said, “You’re not wearing that hat.” I really wanted to, because I had the character of “Budd” in my brain, and I kind of figured what I wanted to do and how I wanted to look. Quentin pretty quickly told me that he didn’t want me to wear it. So when I started doing the readings, I was wearing that hat. I had just come back, and I brought that hat. I had just finished it right when I started to do the table readings for Kill Bill. The thing that snaps into my brain when you said that is.you know in Kill Bill, I had that white Stetson on? That white cowboy hat? Well, I had been in Durango, Colorado, making a western called Renegade, originally called "Blueberry".
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Can you pinpoint another scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie that’s stuck with you?