(September 25, 1957–     ): Tough-guy American actor who portrayed no-nonsense NSA field commander Damian Falco in Die Another Day. Madsen told Empire Online that originally he was asked to play a character who “gets killed by a death ray from space”—presumably referring to the Icarus satellite laser deployed by smarmy billionaire Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). But he held out for a role that might recur in subsequent Bond films. “They told me I could be introduced as a recurring character, so I’d come back in Bond 21 and 22, and then they said if I got tired of it, they’d assassinate me and Bond could use my death as a vengeful reason to do something,” he laughed, saying his young sons would never let him live it down if he got killed off in a James Bond film.[1] Though Falco did indeed survive Die Another Day, with the end of the Pierce Brosnan era, the character never returned to the series.

A native of Chicago, the prolific Madsen made his feature film debut as Cecil Moe in director Edward T. McDougal’s biographical drama Against All Hope (1982). A favorite of writer/director Quentin Tarantino, Madsen has appeared in Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), The Hateful Eight (2015), and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

[1] Willow Green, “Exclusive: Bond Talk—Empire Online Sits Down with Michael Madsen,” Empire Online, June 23, 2002, http://www.empireonline.co.uk/news/news.asp?story=3988 (URL discontinued).