Today, Australians woke up to the sad news that Michael Madsen – an actor best known for his work with Quentin Tarantino – has died aged 67.

He was known as a Hollywood great with roles in films such as Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Die Another Day and Thelma & Louise.

In what appears to be his final official picture before his passing, Madsen appeared to pay tribute to his iconic Kill Bill character at the Chiller Theater Expo in New Jersey where he met and signed autographs for fans.

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In the image, the actor lightly smiled, wearing a Western themed shirt and, of course, a cowboy hat.

Back in 2003 when the first Kill Bill film was released, Madsen’s character Budd quickly became synonymous with his white cowboy hat – but it turns out that the costume piece was never even meant to be a part of the movie.

In one of his final interviews, Madsen spoke with Stephen Baldwin on the One Bad Movie podcast in November 2024, revealing that director Quentin Tarantino told him he wasn’t allowed to wear what is now known as the iconic white cowboy hat.

“I bought that hat in Durango, Mexico when I was doing a western right before we were doing the read throughs for Kill Bill,” he shared.

Madsen explained that he’d formed a sort of attachment to the hat and while he didn’t “have a plan” to wear it during filming, he’d been wearing it to read throughs.

“Quentin comes up to me and he goes, ‘You know, you’re not gonna wear that hat’. I go, ‘What do you mean?’,” Madsen recalled.

He remembered the famed director seeming confused when he told him that he’d simply been wearing the hat “because it’s my hat”, with Tarantino then reiterating to him that he would not be wearing it in the movie.

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“I said, ‘Well I kind of want to now that you’re saying that, I think maybe I will wear it’,” he laughed.

Tarantino eventually caved and allowed Madsen to wear the hat, but it seems that he had a plan in place to get his way all along, in the process creating one of the most talked about scenes from the film.

”He wrote the scene where I have to take the hat off in the strip club and him and Larry [Bishop] didn’t tell me that he was going to say that on camera, that he was going to tell me, ‘Hey why don’t you take off that f—ing hat’, and I didn’t know that he was going to do that,” Madsen explained.

“So when I take that hat off, that was not acting for me because I didn’t want to take the goddamn thing off, but I was trying to go with the scene. I took it off, but it was a trick.

“They played a trick on me to make me take the hat off, which is brilliant. I mean, that’s that’s brilliant filming.”

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Madsen’s publicist Liz Rodriguez told CNN that the actor had died of cardiac arrest on Thursday morning. 

Sgt. Christopher Jauregui, watch commander for Los Angeles Sheriff Department Lost Hills Station confirmed to CNN that deputies responded to Madsen’s home in Malibu and found him “unresponsive.”

He was pronounced dead at 8:25 AM local time and no foul play is suspected.

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