The moment Michael Madsen almost quit ‘Reservoir Dogs’: “That fucked him up”
Ask most fans which scene from Quentin Tarantino’s seminal Reservoir Dogs is the most memorable, and we’re willing to bet it involves a dancing maniac and a terrified cop tied to a chair.
The sequence in which Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde dances to Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ while taking a straight razor to a captured police officer’s ear became infamous for its violence upon release.
In a film full of motormouthed gangsters and Tarantino’s trademark firecracker dialogue, it’s the quiet nature of that scene that really lingers. The clumsy charm of Mr Blonde’s little dance – half pub swagger, half children’s party DJ gone loopy – lands with a queasy thud against the backdrop of utter cruelty. And yet, it’s hard to deny how fucking hypnotic it is. The whole thing plays out like a piss-take that’s gone far too far, the sort of thing you’d laugh at in disbelief before clocking the blood and thinking, “Jesus, what the hell am I watching?”
Nowadays, though, that cop’s bloody ear being severed is the film’s most indelible image, and actor Kirk Baltz, who played LAPD officer Marvin Nash, says he never gets tired of being asked about it. Fascinatingly, though, something happened during the shooting of the grisly scene that made Madsen stop dead in his tracks and feel like he couldn’t finish it.
The line that almost broke Michael Madsen
In 2017, a group of the movie’s core cast members celebrated its 25th anniversary with a 35mm screening at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The Hollywood Reporter interviewed the group, and Madsen revealed that, even though he’s made over 100 films in his career, the only one anyone ever asks about is Reservoir Dogs. In fact, he has a bittersweet feeling toward the film because while it gave him a career, it also typecast him as a villain. He mused, “I would prefer to be a leading man. I’m a leading man in a bad guy’s body, basically. And everybody thinks of me as the guy with the gun.”
Indeed, perhaps the shocking violence of the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs did seal his fate as a bad guy in Hollywood casting agents’ eyes – but it almost never came to pass. Depending on whether you listen to Tarantino or Baltz, a certain line uttered by the officer as he begs for his life either knocked Madsen for six or upset him so much that he could barely complete the scene.
According to Tarantino, when he and Madsen rehearsed the scene before the shoot, with Tarantino reading Marvin’s lines, Madsen had big reservations about it. Tarantino told THR, “I played the cop and said, ‘I have a little kid at home.’ And Michael just had a son, and that fucked him up.” Madsen did indeed have an 18-month-old son at home, and the idea of playing a man who would viciously murder another father gave him pause.
Madsen was also nervous about Mr Blonde’s dance, saying, “In the script, it said, ‘Mr Blonde maniacally dances around.’ And I kept thinking, ‘What the fuck does that mean? Mick Jagger?'” In the end, he didn’t rehearse the dance at all, even avoiding listening to the song until the day of the shoot. He wound up knocking it out in three takes, with the dance being inspired by a weird thing he’d seen James Cagney do in a movie whose title he couldn’t remember.
Baltz remembers things differently, though. In his recollection, the line about having a child at home was an improvisation he made on the day. He once told the Daily Mail that Tarantino came to him before cameras rolled and hinted that he felt he and Madsen had become too chummy during rehearsals, and he was worried this might scupper the scene.
“Before the take,” claimed Baltz, “Quentin said to me, ‘I want you to get Michael to stop, you know? Just make him stop. Don’t let him kill you.'” Baltz knew about Madsen having a young son at home, so he thought, “If I bring up something to do with family, that could do it. He had no idea I was going to yell that.”
In Baltz’s version of events, when he spat, “Stop, I have a son”, it caught Madsen so unawares that he stopped dead in the middle of the scene. Baltz said, “He looked at Quentin, who smiled back; he had done his work. Michael may play the tough guy so much, but he has a soft spot. Quentin loved it so much, it stayed”.
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