Are You Right There, Michael?
He’s best known for his role in Quentin Tarantino’s seminal Reservoir Dogs, but 54-year-old cult actor Michael Madsen is a complicated and controversial character. In the news last week following an incident which saw him being charged with child cruelty, the actor, writer and poet talks about his chequered past, movies, doing that infamous scene in Reservoir Dogs – but most of all about the importance of family.
Olaf Tyaransen, 04 Apr 2012
You’ve appeared in more than 150 films. However, you’re on record as saying that you don’t like a lot of them.
I don’t. A lot of them are crap (laughs).
Which ones do you rate?
Reservoir Dogs. Hell Ride, which was the last picture I did with Dennis Hopper and David Carradine, it’s a motorcycle film. Vice, Strength & Honour, The Getaway, Donnie Brasco. That’s about it.
Strength & Honour was an Irish film, wasn’t it?
Yeah. Shot down in Cork. Those are it. Those are the best ones. All the other ones are crap. That’s a fact.
You’ve also recorded a spoken-word album with Jerry Fish.
Well, it’s not done yet. When I was doing Strength & Honour, Jerry and I started doing recordings. I was reading stuff from my own book and he went off and he got Iggy Pop and Kris Kristofferson and David Carradine and Keith Richards and Willie Nelson and a lot of musicians that he knows. He got a lot of people to read my stuff and then he made music behind it, so we were going to release a spoken-word album of all these people reading various things that I had written, but because of the distance of Ireland to America, and my travelling as much as I do, we haven’t seen each other in, like, six years. And he’s been working on it and developing it, but as far as I know, it’s not done yet. I think one day it’ll be finished!
Anything new happening on the literary front?
I’ve written a book and I’ve got another one that’s just finished, it hasn’t come out yet. Over time, over the years, the books have become accepted and I have been accepted as a writer. Especially in Amsterdam. I went to Amsterdam and I did some public readings and I really felt like I was accepted as a writer. There was a great feeling. It had nothing to do with films or movies, it felt like a separate entity. I was very pleased with that. I think it’s one of those things where it probably won’t really be appreciated for a lot longer because people think it’s a novelty because I’m a film actor – they think, ‘Oh he’s writing books, he’s a movie actor’, they’re not really looking at it seriously and that’s fine. It’s not gonna stop me from writing. I ain’t no Hemingway, let’s face it. But I have written some things that I think are legitimate. I think it’ll stand the test of time. We’ll see.
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