The lunch date with Susan Sarandon that launched Michael Madsen’s career: “I don’t want that fucking part”
When Michael Madsen’s dream of Hollywood stardom first took him from his native Chicago to Los Angeles, he did what most aspiring actors do when they move to Tinseltown: Anything that paid. Soon, while auditioning every chance he got, he settled into a job at a petrol station, where he spent his days putting petrol in celebrities’ cars, driving a tow truck, and changing flat tyres.
Eventually, Madsen began booking minor roles in television shows like Miami Vice, St Elsewhere, and Cagney and Lacey. The paycheques from these gigs weren’t big enough for him to quit his job quite yet, but at least he had begun making progress. Over the next several years, Madsen appeared in a handful of films, including WarGames, The Natural, and Blood Red, yet he still wasn’t making a living from acting alone.
Everything would change in the spring of 1989, though, when he shot a supporting role in Las Vegas for the noir Kill Me Again, which starred Val Kilmer and then-wife Joanne Whalley. While in the city of sin, Madsen met Callie Khouri, the screenwriter of an upcoming feminist crime drama called Thelma & Louise, and when she introduced Madsen to Ridley Scott, the iconic director felt he’d be perfect for the movie.
Unfortunately, the Alien helmer wanted Madsen to play the scumbag who tries to rape Geena Davis’ Thelma in a parking lot, and gets shot to death by Susan Sarandon’s Louise. Madsen had no desire to play that role, and he told Scott as much. “They were laughing at me,” he recalled during an interview with The After Movie Diner in 2023, but he stood his ground and said he didn’t want to be in the movie, even though it was a big studio endeavour. “I don’t want that fucking part!” he exclaimed in frustration. “What am I gonna get out of playing the rapist?”
Madsen’s vociferous insistence that he was willing to walk away must have intrigued Scott, though, because the director asked him who he’d prefer to play in the film. “I said, ‘I’d like to play Jimmy. I want to be Susan’s boyfriend,'” to which Scott replied, “Oh man, I don’t know if that’s going to work out.” However, Scott was willing to roll the dice on Madsen, on one condition: he take Sarandon to lunch to see if they had chemistry.
Amazingly, the young actor, who was still technically pumping gas for a living, was provided with Sarandon’s address. “I picked her up, took her for lunch in Santa Monica,” he stated matter-of-factly. “We never talked about the movie. We just chatted with each other about everything else in the world.”
Whatever Madsen did or showed during that fateful lunch date must have impressed Sarandon, because the very next day, he was offered the role of Jimmy, one of the few times he was able to play a “sympathetic character” in his career, instead of the “bad guy.”
Amusingly, though, when Madsen told his boss at the petrol station, “Hey, man, look, I got this movie and I’m gonna go do it,” it was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. The employer, frustrated that Madsen constantly needed time off to shoot a TV show or a film, complained, “Y’know, why didn’t you tell us you were an actor when we hired you?! Goddamn it.”
He then gave Madsen an ultimatum: stay at the petrol station and give up on the Hollywood dream, or take the part in Thelma & Louise and be fired. “We need you around here, Michael,” Madsen claimed his boss raged. “Make up your fucking mind. The chances of you making it any further are a billion to one.” Of course, this only made an angry Madsen growl, “I think I’ll take my shot,” before he rode off into the sunset on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, never looking back. True story.
