Confessions of a Hollywood hardman

It’s a rainy day in Cork and Michael Madsen couldn’t be happier about it.

“I keep telling people I love the weather here and they look at me like I’m insane,” says the actor. “I was on the radio with some guy this morning and I was saying how the weather here suits my mood. And he goes ‘you must be feeling kind of grim’. But I don’t mean it in that way. I’ve just always liked rain.”
You can see why grey skies might suit such a brooding presence. This is after all a man who writes poems such as End featuring lines like “I’m living to see the destruction/of everything holy, everything hopeful, everything bearded and everything that ever meant anything.”
He laughs when I read it back to him.
“Oh, in my youth, I suppose I was,” he says. “I don’t know. Every time I turn on CNN all that seems to be out there is an abomination. The most dangerous thing about American news is that an opinion is more important than the topic you’re discussing in the first place. There’s no answer or finality offered. When I was a younger man it used to drive me crazy. I wasn’t trying or not trying to be a nihilist. I wouldn’t have known what nihilist meant. But lucky enough, I’ve cheered up a little since then.”
Well, I’d hate to have seen him back then. He’s in good form today as he gears up for the premiere of Strength And Honour, a boxing melodrama set in Ireland with him in the lead role. But with Mr. Madsen, his inner-malcontent is never too far from the surface.
He takes a dim view of Hollywood, that’s for sure.
“The big budget films are controlled by studio heads and very powerful casting directors and agencies,” he complains. “I’m not in that world. They don’t want me in that world. I’m generally thought of as a collaborative actor and you can’t get collaboration on those projects with those people.”
There’s an emphasis on ‘those people’ that leaves you in little doubt about Madsen’s feelings. But he has a point. He talks about Dennis Hopper and Nick Nolte, both good friends of his, and notes that neither actor could have broken through if they started out today.
“That kind of actor is disappearing and instead we get these banal, mindless pretty faces all the time,” says Madsen in his characteristic drawl. “They take these kids, snap them out of the same cookie cutter, stick them in some $100 million movie, put their pictures all over billboards. And people become so used to the banal that banality becomes normal. We had Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and all those tremendous talents. Where are they now? Not in movies that’s for sure. That kind of personality and strength on screen has been stamped out. The guys in the studios don’t want actors that have opinions. That’s a threat to their industry. When will we ever see another Burt Lancaster or Sophia Loren?”
I point out that the divine Ms. Loren would, by today’s standards, be considered far too bulky to ever make it through a screen test. And he’s off again…
“Oh man, those skinny runway models with angry looks on their faces. What is with that? Why do they always look so angry? I don’t know how skinny and confrontational came to be considered attractive. I don’t like women who look they’re getting ready to smack me. Every time I see one of those girls I want to say ‘honey, turn around and don’t come back until you learn to eat and smile’.”
There are more specific grievances too. He’s annoyed that he was passed over for Russell Crowe when LA Confidential had been written with Madsen in mind.
“I didn’t always have the best agent and I didn’t always have the best publicist,” he rages. “As a young actor I never realised how much your destiny is controlled by representation.”
He’s even more annoyed about his bank balance.
“I’ve done a lot of work but I got six children to feed and two ex-wives. There are lot of lawyers out there who’ve made money out of me. Custody battles are costly. And there’s not a huge amount of money to be made in low budget movies. A lot of the time you’re working to scale. If you look at my resume I’ve been working a lot but that don’t mean I’ve been paid a lot.”
He has, it must be said, made some very bad career decisions since he stormed into popular consciousness as Mr. Blonde, the ear-slicing nightmare in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. His CV is littered with straight-to-video-or-hell projects. Worse, he signed up for Wyatt Earp when Tarantino wanted him for the role that would eventually go to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
“I was already contracted to do Wyatt Earp and they insisted that I do two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal and that coincided with the Pulp Fiction shoot. To be honest the rehearsal was a complete waste of time and the movie itself was boring. But maybe Pulp Fiction wouldn’t have been Pulp Fiction without Travolta, you know?”
Still, Michael Madsen is hanging in there. The son of a firefighter and a Emmy-award winning writer, there’s a strangely bipolar quality to Madsen that plenty of directors have noticed. A blue-collar guy with a passion for classic cars, he records his Hemingwayesque adventures in poems, then goes home to his wife and six children.
“My father’s parents came from Denmark,” he says. “They were a family of fishermen. I think certain things are genetic. You just can’t get away from them. I’m not a new guy. I’m a regular old guy.”
So I guess his dad wasn’t too thrilled when Michael announced his ambitions as a thespian.
“You could certainly say that,” he laughs. “I think he thought that it was a joke and that I was a fool doing anything I could to avoid getting a real job. But you know I can’t blame him. I had done all kinds of jobs at that point. I was an auto mechanic and I drove a tow-truck. But nothing ever worked out for me. If I hadn’t had early success with acting I would have turned my back on it.”
When did his dad come around I wonder?
“Around the time I was doing Wyatt Earp. It was a big western so he liked that. He’s think that it’s only a real movie when there are cowboys in it. And my sister Virginia got into movies pretty quickly. But even to this day he says stuff like “So I guess you’re doing another movie.” He’s really into his work ethic so I don’t think he’ll ever think what we do is real work.”
Reading his poems, there’s an irresistibly larger-than-life quality about Madsen. When he his arrived in Hollywood to take a job pumping gas, his first customer was Fred Astaire (“he gave me $100 dollar bill to change his tyre”, he recalls). There have been plenty of bad boy incidents, including getting busted at Cannes with a handgun.
“I had a .38 in my check bag. If you’re not carrying a weapon onto the plane it should be fine. But it wasn’t. Lucky for me, I had been working on a film with Roger Clinton and he was contacted to try and help. I don’t know exactly what happened but I was told he called up his brother who then made a call on my behalf. So I was released pretty quickly.”
Understandably, the call he still wants the most is from one Quentin Tarantino. The pair didn’t speak for years after the Pulp Fiction incident. They ran into each other in 2003 when Tarantino cast him as Budd in Kill Bill right then and there.
“Tarantino just arrived like a bolt. I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I’d love to do more stuff with him. I really hope Inglorious Bastards or one of those projects he’s been telling me about get off the ground. But you can be sure that Quentin will take his time. It’s his world, we’re all just living in.”

Strength And Honour is on general release now