The ‘Reservoir Dogs’ star who tried to punch Michael Madsen in the face: “He took this wild crazy swing at me”
Michael Madsen is an interesting individual, to say the least. The actor, known for roles in Thelma & Louise, Donnie Brasco, and the James Bond adventure Die Another Day, Madsen has numerous run-ins with the law, including being arrested for domestic violence in 2024 and allegedly assaulting his own son after he caught him smoking marijuana.
Outside of the previously mentioned films, Madsen is best known for his multiple collaborations with Quentin Tarantino. You can find him in both Kill Bill movies, as well as Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and The Hateful Eight. However, his biggest role under Tarantino’s employ was easily that of Mr Blonde in the director’s first feature, Reservoir Dogs.
Madsen’s character, real name Vic Vega (brother of John Travolta’s Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction), is one of the colourfully-named jewel thieves at the centre of the action in Tarantino’s crime drama. He puts in a great performance and the movie did wonders for his career, but it also got him into serious hot water with one of his co-stars.
Lawrence Tierney, who plays crime boss Joe Cabot in the movie, once tried to smack Madsen after an on-set argument, according to the man himself. “Lawrence Tierney used to hit me up for $20 every day,” Madsen told The After Movie Dinner. “‘Gimme 20 bucks, gimme 20 bucks.’ I’d say, ‘I just gave you 20 bucks yesterday!’ ‘No you didn’t.’ ‘Yes I did man!’ ‘Gimme 20 bucks.’” Eventually, Tierney’s constant begging for money boiled over and led to a confrontation between the two that turned nasty.
“Tim Roth and I, we took Lawrence to drink,” Madsen continued. “We wanted to see what would happen if we took him to Musso and Frank’s. He got really loaded, he walked outside of the place, onto Hollywood Boulevard and he dropped his pants in the middle of the street; all these cars were stopping, honking. We were like, ‘Lawrence get out of the way! Pull up your fucking pants!’ I had to go out into the street. ‘Lawrence what are you doing?’ I said, and he goes, ‘gimme 20 bucks.’ I go, ‘No! Fuck you.’ He took this wild, crazy swing at me, I backed off, and he missed me by inches. I felt the breeze.”
Tierney, who had made his name playing terrifying criminals in the 1940s and ’50s, was in a bad place when he signed up for Reservoir Dogs. The star of The Greatest Show on Earth and Born to Kill had a serious problem with alcohol and the producers of Reservoir Dogs had expressly told the rest of the cast not to let him drink. Madsen and Roth had done just that to see how far they could push him. In his heyday, Tierney was a notorious brawler, regularly getting into drunken fights in various Hollywood bars. He was even stabbed in an altercation in 1973.
Having drank away a promising career, Reservoir Dogs led to a resurgence in Tierney’s popularity in his later years. He managed to score roles in Junior and Armageddon off the back of their success before he died in 2002, aged 82. Despite their heated exchange, Madsen was able to look back on Tierney with a degree of fondness. “God bless him,” he concluded. “He’s passed away now, but he was quite a character.”
