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
(The interview is interrupted by the arrival of his PA with the Van Gogh-covered notebook of handwritten poems. Madsen wants to read me ‘Looking For Fante’).
Recently I was with my son, we were driving around up in Point Dume. I had read an article in Malibu magazine that [influential LA novelist] John Fante had lived in Point Dume and I never knew that before, and so I suddenly got obsessed about finding his house. I just wanted to see it and go, ‘That’s where he lived’. I was with my little boy, my six-year-old son, and I realised that this journey, this silly drive that we were doing looking for his house, really, it turned into a father and son thing, because I know John had a lot of trouble with his son, and there I was with my son looking for his house so I wrote this fuckin’ thing called ‘Looking For Fante’. Now where’s my fuckin’ reading glasses?
(The reading glasses can’t be found and, despite having better eyesight, this writer proves unable to decipher Madsen’s scrawled handwriting. The poem is reluctantly abandoned).
Did you ever read Fante’s final novel, The Brotherhood Of The Grape? It was all about father-son relationships.
I didn’t read that one. I don’t know if I want to because I know in the end it was really, really sad. And I did read some of the things his son wrote and I was not enamoured with him, really kinda tragic and horrifying and I felt really bad. You know, I have five sons of my own, and being a movie actor you have to be cognisant of what you’re putting out there. And in the beginning when you’re young and naïve and a rabble-rouser, some of these things seem exciting and then later on as you get wiser, if you get wiser, you start to become more cognisant of the kind of material you’re putting out. With your children, you have to be, you have to answer to them. I just don’t want my sons growing up thinking that the world is fantasy, because it’s not.
Even though you work in a fantasy industry.
Well, there’s a lot of fantasy in it and a lot of people do it for that, and that’s where I think it gets screwed up. The media, American Idol, all that shit, all those gigantically stupid things that make everybody nuts for celebrities, just kinda ruining everybody, man, in a sad way and... [shrugs].
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