Chicago native Virginia Madsen relishes deeply satisfying roles, including her latest in ‘Sheepdog’
In the opening scene of the sci-fi movie “Dune,” the face of a beautiful young woman fills the screen, and she intones, in an accent vaguely English but intending to sound otherworldly: “A beginning is a very delicate time … ”
No, not the version starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya — the 1984 film directed by David Lynch, who cast for that opening a very young Virginia Madsen. The tiny appearance was her first major film role after leaving Chicago, her hometown, for Los Angeles.
For Madsen, realizing in her own delicate beginning that she didn’t want to be typecast as a blonde ingénue made working in Hollywood a struggle, she has said in past interviews. She stopped working for a time, went broke. Some four decades later, the movie business still has its challenges for the Oscar-nominated actress.
“It’s really hard to stay in this business for this long because sometimes I just get tired. I’m 64, man. I don’t want to hustle anymore, but I do because I love what I do,” said Madsen, chatting recently with the Chicago Sun-Times from her home in the Hollywood Hills.
Her latest project, “Sheepdog,” has her delivering some of the truest, most heartbreaking lines since her Oscar-nominated performance in the 2004 film, “Sideways.” In the new movie, released nationwide last week, she plays a counselor-in-training, Dr. Elecia Knox, tasked with helping Calvin Cole (actor Steven Grayhm, who also wrote and directed the film), a U.S. Army combat veteran dealing with PTSD and survivor’s guilt.
The death of Madsen’s nephew Hudson Madsen, who died by suicide in early 2022, drew her to the project. The young man was a U.S. Army sergeant and son of the late actor Michael Madsen, Virgina Madsen’s brother. What she particularly liked about the script was that the characters, hers included, find a way to claw through the wreckage of their grief to a better life.
“I guess I wanted to find a way to put my grief into action,” Madsen said. “That’s the terrible thing about suicide. Afterwards, there are no answers. You want to know why, a thousand times, why? But really all you know for sure is the manner in which it was done.”
Researching the part — and screening the movie — involved spending lots of time with grief counselors, as well as current and retired soldiers, Madsen said. “They all said, ‘You got it right. You gave us a voice. There is help. There is hope. There is growth.’ That was so rewarding,” Madsen said.
Sadly, Madsen’s brother did not get to see the film. He suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Malibu last year. “I did have his blessing in doing the film,” Madsen said. “And he was in so much pain, and I told him that I felt like this was the story I could tell. He just said, ‘You should do it. You should do it.’”
Madsen, who is married and has a grown son of her own, said she still loves to visit the Chicago area. “I miss the foliage. I miss the smell of the fall, the smell of the winter,” she said. “There is nothing like Michigan Avenue at Christmas time.”
Madsen was born on the South Side and lived in Evanston, downtown Chicago and the North Shore, graduating from New Trier High school. Her father, a Chicago firefighter, died several years ago. Madsen brought her mother, Elaine Madsen, a writer and filmmaker, to Lake Geneva from California last May to celebrate the matriarch’s 94th birthday.
“The day after we got there, we both got COVID,” the actress said. “We were in this beautiful hotel in Lake Geneva, and we had a balcony and we got to go out and wave. We had to stay a lot longer, and it was just awful.” Virginia Madsen said there are plans in the works to return to the Chicago area for her mother’s upcoming birthday.
Meantime, she says she’s enjoying the role of the mature actress.
“I get much better roles now than I did when I was in my 20s and I was the chick and the girl and the toy and the prop,” she said. “Now I play women who are three-dimensional and have whole lives that they’ve lived. So I’m much more comfortable working.”