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I’ll admit it. When I hear the ’70s song “Stuck in the Middle with You,” the first thing that comes to mind isn’t Stealers Wheel or lead singer Gerry Rafferty. No, I immediately picture razor-wielding jewelry store robber Mr. Blonde, aka Vic Vega, aka Michael Madsen, dancing as he slices a captive cop’s ear off in Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature film, 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. As iconic (and sadistic) as Madsen’s turn was, it was just one of over 300 TV and movie performances the hulking tough guy–who passed away yesterday at 67–made during his 40-plus-year career.
A native Chicagoan, Madsen was born in 1957 to a fireman and a documentary filmmaker (actress Virginia Madsen is one of Michael’s two sisters). After graduating high school, he worked as a mechanic and a paramedic, turning his attention to acting after attending a production of Of Mice and Men by Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Presenting himself backstage, Madsen got an offer from star John Malkovich for information on area acting classes. “I thought he was just trying to get rid of me.” Michael recounted in a 2016 newspaper interview.
The classes worked, with Madsen joining the acclaimed Steppenwolf troupe before moving to California. After appearing in the 1982 faith-based film Against All Hope and two episodes of TV’s St. Elsewhere, he made his Hollywood debut as an Army officer in 1983’s doomsday drama WarGames. 1984 found him alongside Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage in the coming-of-age tale Racing with the Moon and as Robert Redford’s crooked New York Knights teammate “Bump” Bailey in The Natural.
Madsen played a psychotic lover in the 1989 noir-flavored thriller Kill Me Again, with real-life couple Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, but two years later was a more supportive boyfriend to Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise. He was also seen in Oliver Stone’s The Doors and on the small screen in Miami Vice, Crime Story, Quantum Leap and other series.
Michael’s career trajectory was forever changed when neophyte filmmaker Tarantino cast him as one of the six color-codenamed crooks taking part in a jewelry store heist that goes fatally wrong in Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino wanted him for the role of Vincent Vega in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, but Madsen was deep in rehearsals for the frontier drama Wyatt Earp. Around this time he got a change-of-pace chance to play a supportive foster dad in the family whale tale Free Willy and its sequel. His gallery of ’90s films also included the Alec Balwin-Kim Basinger remake of The Getaway (1994); the sci-fi thriller Species (1995); the ’40s LAPD actioner Mulholland Falls (1996); and with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp in Mike Newell’s Mafia thriller Donnie Brasco (1997).
In 2003 Madsen reunited with Tarantino to play Budd, the ne’er-do-well brother of assassin squad leader Bill (David Carradine), in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. He was Halle Berry’s NSA boss in the James Bond entry Die Another Day (2002); Bruce Willis’ corrupt police partner in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s comics-based crime saga Sin City (2005); and later that year he supplied the voice of villainous wolf Maugrim in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Michael also got the chance to spoof his combative off-screen image–and co-star with younger sister Virginia) in 2007’s pseudo-documentary Being Michael Madsen.
From the 2000s through to the 2020s Michael was usually featured in two to five films a year. “You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money,” he confessed to The Guardian in a 2008 interview, “then you go to the Cannes Film Festival and they got some poster of you, 40 feet high, in the worst movie in the world.”
One of his better roles during this time was as an Irish-American former boxer who breaks a vow and returns to the ring to raise funds for his dying son in 2008’s Strength and Honour. Another role came courtesy of his old pal Tarantino, who cast Michael as one of the snowbound frontier folk in 2015’s The Hateful Eight. Madsen also made a cameo appearance four years later in the director’s next film, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s co-star in the fictitious TV western ‘Bounty Law.”
In addition to his hundreds of acting turns, Madsen was also an accomplished poet, with several published books to his credit, and even released his own brand of American Badass hot sauces. Married three times, he had six children (a son, Hudson, died in 2022). Michael passed away from cardiac arrest at his Malibu home on July 3. Remembering her big brother, Virginia Madsen released a statement saying “He was thunder and velvet. Mischief wrapped in tenderness. A poet disguised as an outlaw. A father, a son, a brother–etched in contradiction, tempered by love that left its mark.”