Firewall star's career went happily Sideways

LOS ANGELES—Virginia Madsen, who made a conscious decision to work less after the 1994 birth of her son, has finally found a place in the middle of the Hollywood map. “I was never really away,” she says in a Los Angeles hotel room. “Before Sideways, I was on a side street. I was on a detour over on the edge of the map.”

Madsen wore the can’t-miss label in her early films, which were made in the mid-1980s. Her first job was a supporting role in 1983’s Class, starring high-profile Brat Packers Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe. David Lynch hired her for a lead role in Dune the next year, and she followed it up with more than a dozen productions in the next four years. But the studios stopped calling in the early 1990s, and she was almost invisible by the time Jack, her son with ex-boyfriend Antonio Sabato Jr., was born.

Madsen’s Oscar-nominated role in Sideways has changed her life. Now in demand, she plays Harrison Ford’s abducted wife in the Vancouver-shot thriller Firewall, which opens next Friday (February 10). “They say that sometimes it takes just one job to get noticed,” she explains. “It was a long journey to get there, but it was okay because of the time I got to spend with Jack. And I needed to learn more about my craft. I went back to acting school and I was studying a lot. I was preparing for the big leagues; at least that was what I kept telling myself.”

Madsen’s next film, A Prairie Home Companion, was adapted from Garrison Keillor’s radio dramas by Keillor and Boogie Nights’ Paul Thomas Anderson and directed by Robert Altman. It also stars Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan, and Lily Tomlin. Madsen says that when she was asked what she wanted to get out of the Sideways nomination, an Altman film was at the top of the list.

“It is the kind of movie that I would not have been in had Sideways not happened. To be included in that group of actors, that would not have happened without Sideways.… And to be with this amazing writer [ Anderson] and this directing legend! It was like going to actor camp. No one had trailers. There was a nunnery nearby that had rooms that we used as dressing rooms. We stayed in the theatre in Minnesota and just played all day long and sang and danced. It was incredible. The first day was as exciting as when I did my first movies. I got there and Lily and Meryl were on the stage dancing. I went backstage and cried like a baby.… I felt like it was a culmination of everything that I had worked for. There was just this realization that I had finally made it to where I wanted to be back when I started my career.”

- By Ian Caddell