By most accounts, Michael Madsen was a heated and loving man, and his unexpected death at the age of 67 has led to an outpouring of affection and res
By most accounts, Michael Madsen was a heated and loving man, and his unexpected death at the age of 67 has led to an outpouring of affection and respect for the overdue actor. But he made his name playing the opposite: tough guys, sons-of-bitches, and outright villains. One character stands above them all as the most harrowing: Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs.
Before that 1992 crime thriller, which vaulted a jittery youthful video store clerk named Quentin Tarantino into becoming one of the premier filmmakers of his era, Madsen was a workaday actor, starting out with bit parts on TV shows like St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice and Quantum Leap. In 1991, he stood out as Jim Morrison’s confidante and boozehound buddy in Oliver Stone‘s The Doors, and Susan Sarandon‘s lovestruck musician boyfriend in Thelma & Louise. Then came Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs, a scrappy little indie flick from a nobody director, which immortalized Madsen as the coldblooded career criminal and conscience-free killer Mr. Blonde.
No one who watches that film will ever forget the “ear” scene, in which Blonde tortures a captive police officer (played by Kirk Baltz) after a heist gone wrong. He’s trying … well, he’s not trying to do anything, actually. He’d like to know who ratted out the team of color-coded crooks, but he’s really inflicting suffering just for fun. As Stealers Wheel’s 1972 bop “Stuck In The Middle With You” plays on the radio, Madsen dances and sings along. The muffled cop, lashed to a chair in the center of the warehouse, can’t take his eyes off the straight razor in his captor’s hand.
“In the script, it said ‘Mr. Blonde maniacally dances around,’” Madsen said in a 2017 cast reunion at the Tribeca Film Festival. “I remember specifically that’s what it said. And I remember thinking, ‘What the fuck does that mean, Mick Jagger? What the fuck am I going to do?’ He trusted me on the day that I would come up with something.”
Madsen went understated—a little shuffle, a sway of the hips. Then Mr. Blonde lunges, sawing at the police officer’s head like a hungry man digging into a porterhouse steak.
It’s so savage and sadistic that even the camera can’t bear to look. Tarantino abruptly steers it away from the bloody disfigurement happening just to the right. (“In my film, I want it to hurt,” Tarantino said in a 1992 Associated Press interview. “People tell me they’ve had bad dreams after they saw the movie. That’s exactly what I want. I’m interested in outrageous violence, because outrageous violence is real violence.”)
That moment would have been bad enough, but Madsen takes it to an even more incandescently evil place. The mask cop whimpers, and Mr. Blonde returns to his jocularity, lifting the severed hear to his mouth and speaking into it: “Hey, what’s going on?” He flashes a smile. It seems genuine. He’s having a good time.
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