When Michael Madsen, as trigger-happy bank robber Mr. Blonde, boogied smirkingly to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” while setting fire to a wounded, chair-bound policeman in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 “Reservoir Dogs,” he helped create one of the most chillingly memorable scenes for a heavy in any recent American movie.
That scene, fiercest in a ferocious movie, had the punch of some now-classic forerunners: Richard Widmark kicking the wheelchair-bound old lady downstairs in “Kiss of Death,” Lee Marvin hurling hot coffee at Gloria Grahame in “The Big Heat,” Robert Mitchum stalking his innocent prey in “Night of the Hunter” and “Cape Fear,” and Joe Pesci whacking the waiter in “GoodFellas.” It took you so far into unrestrained, unrepentant evil that you were perversely amused and deeply shocked.
Madsen, equally scary as wild man Rudy Travis in the new film “The Getaway,” couldn’t have brought it off if there weren’t something vulnerable and attractive, as well as foul and brutal, in his part. Or if he didn’t play it with such eerily right twisted humor and scabrous intensity.
Madsen-who was born in Chicago in 1958 and worked as an auto mechanic in town (and whose younger sister is actress Virginia Madsen)-may be one of the movies’ current top heavies. So spontaneous he rarely does any take the same way twice, he can freeze your blood.
But he’s not only a heavy, as he showed as Susan Sarandon’s mensch of a boyfriend in “Thelma and Louise” and last year as the stalwart foster dad in “Free Willy.” “Getaway” producer David Foster, who calls him “very inventive and adventurous,” insists Madsen is a reincarnation of quintessential ’50s and ’60s movie heavy Lee Marvin, Foster’s longtime friend and client.
Director Roger Donaldson calls Madsen a “gem” and adds, “He’s a great heavy, but he will be a great leading man, too-and I want to have a shot at it when he does.”
Madsen’s movie rise was unusual. He got a yen for acting as a teenager, seeing Robert Mitchum in “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” and Kirk Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” on TV while baby-sitting for “my mother’s sister’s kids.” (“I was affected by the loneliness, the outsider role. . . . At the end, I was weeping.”) But instead of drama school, he slid off to meaner streets for a few years. Director Martin Brest, spotting him at a casting call Madsen went to with a friend, told him he should try acting, and Italian action maestro Sergio Leone also encouraged him. (“He really inspired me to be an actor.”)
In Los Angeles, his first breakthrough came in the low-budget film noir “Kill Me Again,” where he played a psychopath who ties a man to a chair and tortures him.
In “The Getaway,” he has his third chair-tying scene, but not from any affinity. Indeed, Madsen first turned down the part of Mr. Blonde in “Dogs” because of the torture scene, going instead for Steve Buscemi’s eventual part of weaselly Mr. Pink, and relenting only when Tarantino refused to cast him as anyone but Blonde.
Madsen offers an interesting story about the chair scene in “Dogs.”
“The actor who played (the policeman) asked me to put him in the trunk of my car and drive him around the block, so he could get into character. I said, `OK.’
“So, I put him in the trunk, but then I went . . . down a bumpy alley, drove around for half an hour, turned on the radio to an oldies station. He kept banging on the trunk; finally I went to a Taco Bell and had a taco and a Coke. Then I drove him back. He was mad and Quentin was in hysterics. . . . But it helped us both. He played that scene in the movie very, very well. He was really suffering. And I tapped into the way authority figures have absolute power. I got carried away.”
It was Madsen’s idea to play Rudy in “The Getaway” with long hair, and though Donaldson wanted the hair blond, they later dyed it red, feeling one blond in the movie (Kim Basinger) was enough. He smiles. “We didn’t want Alec to get confused,” he jokes, referring to Alec Baldwin, the film’s co-star and Basinger’s husband.
Madsen says the crazed, double-crossing sadist Rudy isn’t the worst bad guy he can play.
“I think I have something darker, meaner and more evil to show,” he said. “And the darker and deeper you get-it can just transcend itself.”
