Vic Vega

## Victor Vega

**Victor "Vic" Vega**, better known as **Mr. Blonde**, is the tertiary antagonist of Quentin Tarantino's 1992 directorial debut film, *Reservoir Dogs*. He was a sadistic mobster and professional thief who worked for and with the Cabot crime family. He was also the brother of Vincent Vega from Tarantino's later film *Pulp Fiction* and the cousin of Tim and Suzanne Vega and nephew of Edgardo Vega Yunqué.

Vic was portrayed by Michael Madsen, who also played Budd in *Kill Bill: Volume 1* and *Kill Bill: Volume 2*, Grouch Douglas in *The Hateful Eight* and the Sheriff Hackett in *Once Upon a Time In Hollywood*.

## Biography

### Friendship with the Cabots and Arrest

Being a long time friend of Joe and his son, Eddie Cabot, Vega would work for them. Four years before the film was set, he was caught in a warehouse full of stolen items, presumably on a job for the Cabots. Rather than betray his friends, Vega kept quiet and was consequently sentenced to four years in prison. He also raped other inmates in prison.

### After prison

When Vic was paroled, he was allocated a strict parole officer, named Seymour Scagnetti. Vic hated Scagnetti, as he always kept tabs on him, and would not allow him to leave his halfway house until he had a legitimate job. Vega met with Joe and Eddie Cabot to discuss his problems. As he meets with Joe for a brief conversation, Eddie appears and meets Vic since his imprisonment. He jokes with some comments on him and the two briefly play-fight, as Joe tells them to stop. Vic hears about the heist and wants to join in. He is hired for the job by Joe.

### Becoming Mr. Blonde

Before he went on the job, Vic is put in a team with five other strangers. Joe tells the men that they are to be using color-coded aliases on the job, and did not want them to reveal any personal information to each other. Vega is called Mr. Blonde, and is tasked with crowd control along with Mr. Blue.

#### The Diner

On the morning before the diamond heist, Mr. Blonde haves breakfast with Joe, Eddie and the rest of his team where he is shown listening to Mr. Brown's opinion on "metaphor dicks" off of Madonna's "Like a Virgin". When Mr. White takes away Joe's address book and mocks him, Mr. Blonde jokingly intervenes and requests to Joe that if he wants him to shoot Mr. White, who jokes on Mr. Blonde and he mimics a gunshot. He is also annoyed when Mr. Pink did not tip the waitresses.

### During the Heist

During the heist, Mr. Blonde watches the civilians. When one of them triggers the alarm, warning and alarming the police, Mr. Blonde begins a shooting-spree, killing the civilians. The six men escapes seperately and he manages to escape by taking Marvin Nash, an uniformed police officer, hostage.

### At the warehouse

Mr. Blonde then arrives at the warehouse. He then watches Mr. White and Mr. Pink argue and drawing their weapons onto each other. The two men begins to notice Mr. Blonde at the corner when he makes a comment. Then, Mr. Pink tries to explain to Blonde about the causes of what had happened but Mr. White interrupts him and angrily berates Mr. Blonde about the shooting-spree during the robbery. Mr. Blonde calmly dismisses the remark and said the people he shot deserved it. Mr. White comes up onto Mr. Blonde but Mr. Pink breaks them up. Also, to revise his amusement, the trio goes to Mr. Blonde's car and he reveals Marvin Nash inside the trunk, much to their amusement and hapiness. Mr. White and Mr. Pink then savagely beats Marvin Nash into a bloodied pulp in order to gather information of the rat as Mr. Blonde watches to his own amusement, though he has briefly beating Nash off-screen and duct-taped him into the chair. When Eddie arrives, he orders White and Pink to accompany him into retrieving the remaining diamonds as he also orders Blonde to watch Marvin Nash and the unconscious Mr. Orange.

### Torturing Marvin Nash

When the three men leaves with Mr. Blonde left behind, he takes off his coat and goes up to Marvin Nash. Mr. Blonde first reconciles with the police's involvement with the heist, much to Nash's response, but he dismisses this and tells Marvin Nash that he doesn't have a boss, sort of slapping Nash in the face and Marvin relunctantly agrees. He then duct-tapes Marvin's mouth shut. As he announces his torture on Marvin, he jokes around on him by drawing his gun, causing the policeman to become frightened. Mr. Blonde pulls out a razor-blade from his ankle holster and turns on the radio, changing the radio stations to K-Billy and the song *Stuck in the Middle with You* comes on. Mr. Blonde begins to dance around with the song as Nash watches. He pauses for a moment before he slashes Nash's face and holds his face, leading him into severing Nash's ear off. As Nash becomes extremely painful to the injury, Mr. Blonde leaves the warehouse to go to his trunk to grab gasoline. He returns and the cop is still in pain and he soaks Nash all over with gasoline. He then releases the duct-tape off of Nash's mouth, who is screaming in pain.

### Death

He soaks Nash some more as he makes a trail of gasoline. As Marvin pleads for his life, Blonde remarks if he is done. Then he pulls out a lighter and attempts to ignite it, but Mr. Orange, who has regained consciousness, empties his magazine into Mr. Blonde's chest. Mr. Blonde, soaked in blood, stares at Orange briefly before he collapses.

After Mr. Blonde's death, Nice Guy Eddie along with Mr. White and Mr. Pink return to the warehouse to find Mr. Blonde shot dead. Eddie is furious at Mr. Orange for shooting his best friend, and kills Nash in a rage. Mr. Orange tries to convince Eddie that Mr. Blonde was going to kill Eddie too, but Eddie refused to believe Orange. Mr. White, on the other hand, was glad that his point had been proved that Mr. Blonde was a psychopath.

## Other appearances

Mr. Blonde is a playable character for 3 missions in the *Reservoir Dogs* video game adaption released in 2006. He is again voiced by Michael Madsen, who is the only actor from the movie to give his likeness and voice to the game.

The game depicts what Mr. Blonde was up to after the heist went wrong. A mission involves him escaping through a shopping mall, and taking the cop Marvin Nash hostage. Another mission has Mr. Blonde being chased by the cops with Marvin in the trunk of his car and he must not slow down to avoid Marvin escaping.

His "signature move" in the game (a method used to make all police surrender) is slicing an ear off, a reference to the infamous ear cutting scene from the movie.

## Personality

Vic 'Mr. Blonde' Vega, is reticent and very calm, only speaking when he is spoken to. This, however, makes him even more nightmarish than he appears. He is sadistic, psychopathic, homicidal, profane, and shameless. He takes pleasure in torturing and killing cops and innocent people, as expressed when he tortures Nash while dancing around. It's even stated by "Nice Guy" Eddie that while he was in prison, he raped other inmates. Vic has no measure of humanity whatsoever, as he says that the people he shot in the bank "they set off alarm, so they deserved what they got". Despite this, he is fiercely loyal to Joe and to Eddie, since he never ratted either of them out when he was sent to prison for four years. It is possible he was a much different person before going to jail, but any events prior to his arrest is unknown. He also seems to suffer from a superiority complex as he slapped Nash for calling Eddie his "boss".

## Trivia

* Despite being the most murderous and bloodthirsty character on screen, and being slated by the other robbers, Vic never actually kills anyone during the entire movie.
	+ Also, despite having pretty much the least screentime out of all the robbers, he is by far the evilest and most sadistic out of all of them.
* Vega is a playable character in the video game adaptation of *Reservoir Dogs*. He is voiced by Madsen, and is the only character to feature the original actor's voice and likeness.
* Ironically, the actor who played Vega, Michael Madsen, is averse to violence, and had a hard time shooting the torture film sequence. In a part of the scene where Officer Nash pleads for his life by saying he has a child at home, the line was ad-libbed; Madsen himself had just become a father at that time, and was so horrified that he had to stop the scene.
* Vic's relations with his brother Vincent Vega, who appears in Pulp Fiction, is debatable, it's unknown about their relations, since they never interacted on screen.
* Tarantino wanted Madsen to play Vincent Vega in *Pulp Fiction*, but eventually cast John Travolta due to Madsen already starring in Wyatt Earp, and decided that the two were brothers. He planned to make a film that starred both characters, *The Vega Brothers*, but the project has now been abandoned.
* Matt Dillon was considered for the role of Mr. Blonde.
* The Cadillac Coupe de Ville that Vega drove also belonged to Michael Madsen, due to the budget was not big enough to rent a car.
	+ That also includes his outfit which jacket and pants that came from two different suits.

## References

1. ↑ http://www.film.com/movies/story/michael-madsen-talks-hell-ride/22258175
2. ↑ https://www.indiewire.com/2014/01/watch-24-minutes-of-pulp-fiction-deleted-scenes-and-learn-vincent-vega-was-suzanne-vegas-cousin-more-90435/
3. ↑ https://www.indiewire.com/2019/09/michael-madsen-pulp-fiction-role-travolta-tarantino-1202174139/