RIP Michael Madsen, A Star Who Could Have Been a Bricklayer

The middle of a movie reveals its character. In the two-part American revenge epic Kill Bill, Michael Madsen arrives at the top of the second film. A Deadly Viper Assassination Squad alumnus, Madsen’s Budd lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert like an Old Testament penitent might.

His brother, David Carradine’s titular Bill—the chairman of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and ex-husband of our hero, Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo—pays a visit to Budd in the wasteland. He tells Madsen’s Budd that revenge is coming. It is the most elegiac scene in the two films. Budd has made himself a man on the margins, the only antagonist who carries the weight of what he's done. Carradine tries to humiliate Madsen over selling a legendary samurai sword. Madsen doesn’t bite. Carradine tries to scare Madsen with a warning about Beatrix’s warpath. Madsen’s Budd knows that they did something terrible when they tried to kill Thurman’s Beatrix on her wedding day. He doesn’t fear death. And then he whispers the line that carries the films’ sentiment:

“I don’t dodge guilt.”

When Thurman and Madsen collide, Madsen’s Budd fights with a strange cowardice. He doesn’t fight her blade for blade or hand to hand. He is smart enough to know that she’d demolish him. He fires shotgun shells loaded with rock salt, enough to stun and sting and smash her into unconsciousness. But he doesn’t want to perforate her. He does bury her alive, but there’s an ambiguity in that. Does he think she might make it out? He knows of her relentless, imperial badassery. Did he give her a chance to survive while still doing what his brother and former patron asked of him? We never know. Madsen is, as the saying goes, wandering in from a different movie. Madsen’s movie was almost always the more interesting one.

Coburn but sad. Bronson but wryer. Another weary, beat-up, sly face from an era in which actors were not necessarily gorgeous children of bankers and academics who plop down in Echo Park fresh from Yale or NYU, dewy and well-funded. Madsen came up through Steppenwolf Theater, because of course he did. He was the child of a brave, independent mother who left a corporate job to be a writer. He was no one. When he got his hand and footprints done outside the TCL Chinese Theater, he said that he “could have been a bricklayer. I could have been an architect. I could have been a garbage man. I could have been nothing. But I got lucky. I got lucky as an actor.”

You can clock the moment he stopped being nobody. He made the scene in Reservoir Dogs that shot Tarantino into the stratosphere, dancing to “Stuck in the Middle with You” as he Van Gogh-s a cop’s ear. If that were all, you’d have a legendary performance. An all-time trivia pull of a name. But Madsen gave us more.

His face voice and aura dovetailed with Tarantino’s career. Their collaborations felt beshert. Madsen didn’t simply act like a character in a pulp novel or an ignored post-war crime classic. He was those things. The feline eyes. The wide flat cheeks and strong presidential chin carrying age the way a tree does. Madsen was a David Goodis or Jim Thompson novel made real.

The craggy skullcracker in The Hateful Eight and the blasting cap of Donnie Brasco’s mafioso paranoia were deeply in his wheelhouse. He improvised his lines in Sin City, a movie that exists to have Michael Madsen in it. But the movies in which he was cast against type held Madsen’s burly vulnerability toward the light. He played Susan Sarandon’s decent boyfriend in Thelma & Louise. In his limited screen time, he’s her guy Friday, wiring her life savings to her and getting gently turfed after a marriage proposal. He's lovely as a conflicted working-class foster dad in Free Willy who arrives into love for his adopted son by driving his truck into the tank in which Willy is held, liberating the whale and setting the audience free.

I carry a candle for his work in the clamor of 90s VHS trash classic Species, whose premise generative AI will never touch: experimented-upon alien assumes form of knockout blonde and kills men after seducing them, a post-HIV, post-Pill sci-fi cautionary tale about the female sex drive, Frankenstein for incels. They truly do not make ‘em like that anymore. Species somehow stars Forest Whitaker, Ben Kingsley, and Alfred Molina. But Madsen walks away with the movie. He plays the black bag mercenary Preston Lennox. It’s a name that sounds like its owner had a mean squash game at Bowdoin, but Madsen plays him like a Buffalo teamster. He hits the punchlines like a rust-belt Bond—“If I’m here, I think the shit has definitely hit the fan”—and properly titrates the film’s campy, horny, well-rendered midnight movie aura.

He was well acquainted with the night. His son died from suicide. He wrote an as-of-now unreleased collection of “outlaw thoughts” and poetry. He died at 67. You wonder if there was one more revival there, one more chance for him to deliver.

In a moment in which the idea of the forgotten white man in America has gotten a bit too much maudlin attention, and all the hard truths and the political consultant hogwash about that demographic swirl together, I think of Madsen as the embodiment of a particular kind of gritty, forlorn American male forever bound to weirdness. In another era he would have been in Easy Rider or in Fat City. We had him instead. We had Michael Madsen, a fountain of glorious American gravel that scuffed everything it touched.