When Michael Madsen tells you to have a sweet roll, you have a sweet roll. The gravelly voiced, intense actor sometimes known as Mr. Blonde is holding court in the penthouse suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel to talk up the Reservoir Dogs videogame from Eidos, and he wants me to have a snack while he finishes a phone call. 

Madsen was the only actor from the film to lend his voice and likeness to the game, and, once the phone call was finished and the pastry consumed, I was lucky enough to chop it up with him about Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino, videogame violence, and what it was like working with Uwe Boll.

With the fifteen year anniversary of Reservoir Dogs coming up, and a videogame version set for release, I gotta ask, if you could go back and do all again, would you still be Mr. Blonde, or would you pick a different color?

I wanted to be Mr. Pink. I tried to talk Quentin into letting me be Mr. Pink, because I had done Thelma and Louise with Harvey and our scenes  were cut out of the movie, I guess for plot reasons or whatever. I wanted to be Mr. Pink, because he had more scenes and more dialogue with Harvey and… when I heard that Harvey was going to play Mr. White that was one of the original things that I talked to Quentin about it.

He said, ‘No, I want you for Mr. Blonde.' I said, ‘Let me read some scenes.  Let me show you… Mr. Pink.’  And so, you know, Quentin said, ‘Okay,’ and I didn’t even know Quentin at that point.  And the first time I met him was actually when I went to 20th Century Fox where they had the casting office and I had memorized all of Mr. Pink’s dialogue (laughs)… I did all of Mr. Pink’s scenes.  And Quentin was very patient, listening to me, and then at the end he goes, ‘Okay, that was great! That was great! But, um, how do you feel about the role of Mr. Blonde?’  So - I had no chance!

But if I could go back and do it again, I might have spoke a little slower as Mr. Blonde. It’s just an actor thing.  I thought I was talking; I thought my dialogue was a little fast. And I might learn how to dance.

I thought the dancing was fantastic!

Well, that came  from the Twilight Zone, because I don’t dance. When we were rehearsing for Dogs, every time we got up to that point in the story, I would say, ‘Quentin, I don’t wanna, let’s not rehearse this part cause I don’t know what I’m gonna do.' And I didn’t really know what I was gonna do till the day we actually shot it. But other then that, you know, God, I guess there wouldn’t be too many things, uh,  I would change. 

So, the game’s coming out and you're the only original cast member to sign up. Why did you want to do it?

I was happy to be involved. I’m glad they came to me with it.  I’d sure hate to see myself in a videogame with someone else’s voice. Or a guy who didn’t look like me being Mr. Blonde. My sons would never forgive me for that.  You know, they’d say, ‘Dad!  Dad!  How come you didn’t- how come you didn’t do it?’ I was happy and I loved doing the recording and they did a grafting of my face to copy my expressions and things like that.  For me, it was a good experience; you know, it’s fun. 

What’s the experience of doing a voice in a video game versus starring in a movie?

Well, the good thing about doing a voice over thing is that you don’t have to shave.  And you can show up in your pajamas. It’s a nice way to spend a day, just in the studio, with the creative people. I like the voiceover thing. The whole market’s been cornered by Keifer Sutherland and Martin Sheen, so I’m lucky to get a mattress commercial. 

But the voiceover thing is very good, I’m very well represented in the voiceover department. I’m with Special Artists, and that’s the best place to be as far as I’m concerned, but it’s a tough aggressive, competitive market, and it’s really hard to get a gig with voiceover stuff.

The character of Mr. Blonde in the movie was psychotic.  Will there be any of that sort of action in the game, like cutting off peoples’ ears, or tying up a cop and setting him on fire?

I’m pretty sure you could control Mr. Blonde to cut off anybody’s ear. Anybody he encounters he’s having a problem with, I think there’s an option where you hit a button or whatever you do, that makes him cut off that person’s ear.

The ear-cutting option.

Yeah!  They have the-ear cutting option. I know that much. I saw that at the convention. 

The Reservoir Dogs game is really controversial in Australia and England because of its violence Do you have any opinions on that debate about video game violence and that kind of thing?

Well, you know, all I can say is that, years ago, I was approached to do a voiceover for Vice City, and that was really the beginning of this whole frenzy of video games. Little did I know what I was doing because I was offered a voiceover job. I think I didn’t have more then 10 lines in that thing, and they said it was a videogame about this car that drives around. I asked them some more questions about what happens in the game and how it works, and they didn’t really know! 

They said they were still developing it; they were putting it together.  And like I say, you have to understand at that point in time, nobody had seen that kind of thing before.  And so I very naively went in and recorded my lines, and I thought ‘This is great; I did a voice in a game,’ and there’s no money in it.  I mean, they don’t give you a piece of the action; they don’t give you a percentage, you don’t get any residuals.

It’s too bad with that one in particular.

Yeah, you basically get nothing.  You get a flat fee for the day when you come in and do the voice.   And I got a family to feed, and I went in and I did the voice, and then, of course, when the game finally came out, and since then, these kinds of games have come out where the character can get in the back seat of a taxi with a hooker and the health meter goes up. I got no problem with that. But then you can take the hooker out of the car and kill her and take the money back.  That part of it really bothers me. 

That part, I think, is horrendous; and that part is like, I don’t really think kids need to be doing that.  That part of it is… I do have an opinion about that and I don’t think that’s cool. I think over-18 is fine. But everybody knows that it doesn’t really work that way, because people go in and they rent the game, inevitably, kids under 18 are gonna play it and gonna see it..  It’s not like there’s a padlock on it with a special key. 

They’re gonna see it eventually, and so, I’m a little confused by the whole thing; I’m a little bewildered, because once upon a time people were smashing Elvis records and the people were up in arms about things years ago, you know, about the generation.  And I’ve talked to my kids about it, and they say ‘Dad, it’s just a game.  We’re just playing a game.’  And to them, apparently, they think it’s just a game.  Maybe we're overreacting to something that the kids nowadays, you know, to them, it’s harmless.  But it’s a big question; it really is a big giant question. 

Would you let your kids play Reservoir Dogs?

Well, to a certain extent, I’m not going to be able to stop them.  I certainly don’t want my 8 year-old playing it, but the 16 and the 12 and the 11 year-olds,  they’re already way, way, way beyond that. 

Kids nowadays are a lot more mature in a lot of ways then we are.  I mean, all you gotta do is turn on CNN, and believe me, the things that you see on TV are a lot more horrendous and worse then any videogame.  You know, we’re living a in a world now where everything that happens is instantly broadcast to the entire world. 

I was leaving the house the other morning and there was a news broadcast about some guy who stabbed his wife to death and then when the stepson got in the middle of them to try to stop it, he stabbed the boy, and picked up the kid and threw him over the balcony and killed him. So he killed the mother and the boy. And as I was leaving the house, I was going, "My god, you know, it’s another horrendously horrible news story that I’ve just heard."  And then I got a call that, in fact, the boy who was killed was one of my son’s best friends from my son’s school. You know, when it gets that close, I mean, it’s really, really tough. 

You have to realize that years and years ago, the media wasn’t what it is now.  And you gotta think of all the shit that happened over the years that nobody ever knew about, during World War 2 even, now the Iraq War, every single thing that happens there on a daily basis is immediately broadcast to the entire world, and think of all the things that happened during World War 2 that no one knew anything about.  And the instant availability to these kind of horrors I think has desensitized people in a lot of ways. So who’s to say a videogame is promoting violence, when you can turn on the TV and find out that your son’s best friend was thrown off the balcony? 

What was the point of showing the entire world how to make the bomb with the hand lotions and things?  You know, if they discovered that was do-able, and they’re gonna stop air traffic, and stop hundreds of thousands of people from traveling, and then tell a woman that she can’t even bring some diaper rash... can’t even bring some butt paste on a fuckin’ plane…. and then they got some scientist on TV that basically shows you how to make the bomb with what they’re talking about!

Well, who’s to say that there’s not some lunatic out there who never would have figured that out, and basically what they did was just show everybody else how to do it?  THAT is something that is very bewildering to me, and I do not understand what the point of that would be. Does that fall under Freedom of Information act?  Well, because everybody’s really curious to know, ‘well, how could you possibly make a bomb out of toothpaste and makeup or hairspray or something?’  You tell everybody, ‘no, you can’t bring anything like that on a plane from now on.’  Well, that’s a good enough answer for me.  Somebody figured out how to do something like that, so we can’t bring the stuff on- Okay, fine!  But don’t come on television and start showing everybody how the fuck to do it!

All they really did was put themselves in a position where everybody knows how to do it!  I thought that was really ridiculously irresponsible and preposterous. It’s just amazing to me.

It seemed kind of ridiculous to focus on things that happened in a videogame when all these real things are happening in the actual world.

Yeah!  The video games are an easy target when all this other shit is going on.  I already made my statement about the horrendousness of the, that one section of the game that I talked about; I didn’t think it was necessary.  But hopefully it will reach a point where, um, I mean, we’re never gonna know until this generation of kids grows up and we kinda start to see the things they do or don’t do.

And I think at the bottom line of it all, it’s all about parental control.  You really got to keep an eye on your kids and what they do, and really that’s what it comes down to.

Do you play video games yourself?

Uh, no.  I’m not a gamer.  I’m slowly being sucked in the vortex of it.  My sons have a lot of football and basketball video games. They play them endlessly; where you can name the quarterbacks and name the players; you can even give them your own name.  They love that stuff; they play all the time, and I basically have to force them to go outside and ride a motorcycle or play basketball or go swimming, and to do physical stuff. 

I think a big problem that I’ve noticed is that a lot of kids are becoming, all they want to do is sit in a couch and play videogames.  And that’s a parental thing. I think parents have to find a time to tell the kids, ‘Okay, you can play the video games now and now I’m gonna shut it off; now you’re gonna go out and do something else with your time.’ 

I don’t have much time to play games, and, quite frankly, the whole thing of it seems to me to be something that’s for kids.  Um, and I also said I’m being sucked into the vortex.  I think that I most likely probably will learn, especially with Dogs coming out, I’m going to have to learn how to play it; it will be fun.

Watching you play as yourself would be kinda cool.

(laughter) Yeah!  I guess it would be!

You were in the movie Bloodrayne.

Yeah. 

Which is kind of the opposite of what you did with Reservoir Dogs. You took a character from a videogame and played it in a movie.  What was that like?   Did you do research based on the game?

Well, I wasn’t aware of the game, and when I got offered the script my sons told me about the game.  You know, I thought riding around in a horse, sword fighting, vampires, in Romania... I’d never been to Romania and I thought it would be great. I mean, I’ve been all over the world as an actor.  It’s one of the good things about being an actor, is you get to travel all over the world.  And so the experience of it sometimes is as important to me as the material. And if you can combine the two, sometimes it’s a disaster-- it’s a catastrophe--and sometimes it works out to be a lot of fun. I really did it because it was somewhat of a heroic role, being that I’m chasing vampires.  When I first got it, I thought they wanted me to be one of the vampires, and I probably wouldn’t have done that. 

But when I heard Ben Kingsley was playing king of the vampires, I thought, ‘Well, okay,’ and, you know, Kristanna Loken is… uh, she was in Terminator, and I thought she can certainly handle it, and I… I’m trying to turn the corner.  I’m tired of playing the villain, you know?  Bogart did it; you know, he got off the villain track, and I want to be the guy who rides into the sunset, you know, after saving the people in the town.  And Bloodrayne was kinda my chance to do that.

What was it like working with Uwe Boll?

Well, he’s a very creative guy, he’s very funny, you know?  He’s very, very funny, even when he doesn’t know when he’s being funny. He’s a very gentle man. He’s very kind.  He had a big, big, big production to handle there and, you know, he talked to me about doing some other projects, but, uh, I haven’t heard from him.

Let me ask you this question- would you cop to anything geeky as a hobby, at all?  

Well, I wrote a couple of books, a couple of books of short stories and poetry.

That’s not geeky!  That’s manly, like Hemingway or something.
 
My writing is adult writing, that’s for sure.  I’m not recommending any children to rush out to the bookstore for the stuff I write, but, I paint a little bit, and a friend of mine has an art studio, some molding clay, and I try to read as much as I can… I dunno, if you mean, am I taking up knitting? The answer would be ‘no.’

Oh, you know what?   I got one last question: Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie?  Or are you gonna bite?

(laughs)  I’m gonna bite and I’m gonna chew.