जीवनी

During filming of टोटल रिकॉल (1990), Arnold Schwarzenegger noticed that he was constantly on the phone between takes. When he broached the subject with him, he was told the he was phoning his sister and that she was currently suffering from cancer. Arnold immediately brought Michael to his trailer and they had an hour-long 3-way conversation with Ironside's sister about what exercises she should do and what kinds of foods she should be eating. Ironside has never forgotten Schwarzenegger's kindness and neither has his sister.

Has had a love of reading since childhood, with which he credits his father instilling in him: "My dad gave me and my brother this rule - as long as we were reading and doing nothing else, we could stay up until dawn or until we passed out... whichever came first. That's why, to this day, I'm a sucker for a good book.".

Admitted in an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos that he has had both his knees replaced (they are both titanium). He ruined them playing football and roofing before he made it into films.

At age 15, he wrote a play called "The Shelter" which won first prize in a Canada-wide university contest. He used the prize money to mount his own production of said play.

Has turned down roles of characters in wheelchairs due to his last name being the same as Raymond Burr's paraplegic television character.

I like to play bad guys, since good guys are always beaten up several times during the movie. Bad guys are beaten only once, in the end.

I get to bring these misshapen, emotionally unbalanced people to life.

If I didn't like the attention, I suppose I wouldn't be doing this job. What do you do? Destroy someone's fantasy about you or play it to the limit? I still haven't quite worked it all out and I don't know how to resolve it. It's said actors act because they fear death and it's the one and only certainty for some kind of immortality. My attitude is: screw the future, let's get on with here and now. You don't know how long it'll last.

The weirder the role, the more toys around to help suspend reality, the easier it is - and the better I think my work gets. All of these things make it easier to take risks. Children - and actors - take risks all the time.

Acting itself is a very childlike thing. You're asked to suspend reality and to play - and what better place than when you're sitting there looking like the most weird villain imaginable? You have all these toys around you. It brings out the child in you much easier than when you're standing around in a suit playing a cop.