He is one of our great actors. Also one of our most inscrutable, most eccentric, and most misunderstood.
But as Cage makes his case here, every extraordinary thing about his wild work and life actually makes perfect ordinary sense.
Nicolas Cage has spent recent days this winter mostly inside, reading scripts and watching movies and preparing to welcome a baby with his wife of a year, Riko Shibata. They have the names picked out already: Akira Francesco for a boy and Lennon Augie for a girl. “Augie was my father’s nickname. And my uncle”—the director Francis Ford Coppola—“has decided to change his name to Francesco,” he says, excitedly showing me the two-month ultrasound on his phone. “I think it’s so sweet. It’s like a little edamame. A little bean.”
Redemption does seem to have arrived for Cage, at long last. After falling millions of dollars into debt, and then working tirelessly to dig himself out, he has made many movies—too many movies—that only reinforced the idea that Cage was maybe a little insane. And yet, through the 12 years that followed the death of his beloved father, the turmoil of near-bankruptcy, and the big studios turning their backs on him, Cage has stayed committed to delivering flashes of his highly personal brilliance in smaller projects.
“I had some moments that I went off and did some wild stuff , but a lot of that was by design,” he says. “I think many people in the public got swept up with an idea of me being kind of a wild madman, which was fun in the beginning.” That doesn’t mean he’s entirely comfortable with where his public persona exists in 2022. For a while, Saturday Night Live had a recurring segment featuring Andy Samberg as a gleefully psychotic version of the actor. Cage gamely appeared alongside him in 2012, referencing National Treasure with the punchline: “We’re gonna have a threeway with the Declaration of Independence.” Now he says the show is asking him to host this spring, but he’s not so sure. “I feel like saying, ‘Well, why don’t you call Andy Samberg? I mean, I hear he’s available.’”
Cage came into the world in Long Beach, California, to this remarkably erudite and accomplished family that would indelibly shape and influence him. Francis cast him in a few early roles, but, wanting to shake off accusations of nepotism, Cage engaged in his first act of deliberate myth-making. He changed his last name, inspired by the avant-garde composer John Cage and the Black superhero Luke Cage. As a young man, he had a particular notion of himself that he was determined to prove: “That I had something, and it wasn’t simply because I was born into a Coppola family. It was because I thought I had a unique way of feeling things and looking at things.”
ONE THING CAGE wants to make sure you know is that it wasn’t the skulls that did him in. No, it was mostly bad real estate decisions. More mortgages than he could keep up with and a bubble that burst on him, and everyone else, too. “I didn’t believe in stocks because I think they’re like gambling and they’re dangerous, but you can dump a stock,” he says, reflecting on the 2008 crash. “You can’t get out of real estate that quickly.” In 2009, he sued his former business manager for allegedly leading him “down a path towards financial ruin”. The money manager countered with a suit about how he couldn’t control the actor’s profligate spending. Both suits were reportedly dismissed the following year. Whatever the case, Cage owed the IRS around $14 million and, to other creditors, millions more.
Though there was a period of Cage’s life when he raked in $20 million a movie, he grew up only in the shadow of wealth. That wealth was just out of reach at home, as well. Cage would see his uncle Francis surrounded by opulence in Napa Valley, and even lived with him for a stint. In old interviews, Cage compares himself to the scheming orphan Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. “Oh, God,” he groans, when I bring it up now. “Maybe I was fascinated by my uncle’s lifestyle. My father was on a teacher’s salary. I would be in that little house in Long Beach, which was still a great house. But that not – withstanding, you go from there and you see Uncle’s house. I didn’t know what the costs of things were. I just liked what they looked like.” Eventually he made enough money to buy the things he liked to look at. He purchased a home for his dad in Newport Beach, too. “It was like paradise. We used to go have abalone and Martinis at 21 Oceanfront for lunch and talk,” he says. “I knew I gave him some happiness before he went.”
What followed his father’s death and his financial ruin was a decade-long odyssey to do as many movies as possible for as much money as possible to pay his debts. In the years since going broke, Cage appeared in 46 movies, an experience he likens to “a conveyor belt”. (By comparison, in that same time, Brad Pitt made 19, Tom Cruise, 11, and Leonardo DiCaprio, 9.) Cage is matter-of-fact when he speaks about how he went from headlining block – busters to going straight to VOD. “The phone stopped ringing,” he says. “It was like, ‘What do you mean we’re not doing National Treasure 3? It’s been 14 years. Why not?’” He would often get a circuitous answer, but he knew what the elephant in the room was. “Well, Sorcerer’s Apprentice didn’t work, and Ghost Rider didn’t really sell tickets. And Drive Angry, that just came and went.’”
Alongside the downturn in his career, we started to see the cracks in his personal life. There was much more that we didn’t see. Namely, him grieving his father and trying to take care of his elderly mother. “I’ve got all these creditors and the IRS and I’m spending $20,000 a month trying to keep my mother out of a mental institution, and I can’t,” he says. “It was just all happening at once.”
Cage was adamant that he would never file for bankruptcy, even when people kept telling him to press that button. And he wants to clear up a misconception about the work he took on to prevent that from happening. “When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all,” he says. “They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like Mandy, but some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring.” Eventually, it added up. About a year and a half ago, he finished paying off all his debts.
WE MEET AGAIN on a rainy and dark evening in New Orleans.
There are ghosts everywhere. This is what happens when you have a history with a place. Cage has lived in New Orleans and filmed some of his most memorable movies here. Here is where he “began to understand more of the romantic world”, he says. “This is a city that can have that dark side. It’s very present. And the reality is, we both know I’m probably never really going to leave New Orleans.”
Well, yes. Because of the tomb.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” Cage says, drawing his hands up and smiling. I say I saw it for myself the day before and he seems surprised, but nods. “Well. You can talk about it.” Okay, here goes: When Cage ultimately passes, he will be buried in the historic St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, which is one of this country’s most exclusive places to spend eternity. His tomb is a flawless white pyramid, about nine feet tall. It’s understandable that he doesn’t want to get into it, considering the other misconception top of mind tonight. Such as: “The misconception that I’m crazy, which people seem to enjoy, the madman or whatever—to which I simply say you can’t survive 43 years in Hollywood or star in over 120 movies if you’re crazy. You’re not going to get bonded. They’re not going to work with you,” he says. “You’ve got to be healthy,” he adds.
“My doctor says I have the liver of a 13-year-old choir boy, you know?” Alcohol is completely off the table when he’s working. “I have to focus, and it leads to anxiety,” he says.“It’s so hard to retain the dialogue if you’re doing that.” How then, does he account for his drunken incidents? “It’s like an eraser on a chalkboard, but it’s a slippery slope because I don’t drink often,” he says. “And when you do that, you’re out of practice.”
The marriages, too, have been some of the more salacious parts of his story in the public imagination. Twenty-seven-year-old Shibata is his fifth wife. “I am a romantic, and when I’m in love, I want to give that person everything I can,” he says. “It’s my expression of saying, ‘I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ And this is it for me.” He shakes his head and looks down at his plate, speaking to himself more than to me. “I mean, this is not happening again. This is it. This is it.”
He’s thinking about the fresh start he’s been granted. About how he probably wouldn’t have ever done something like Pig, the performance that definitively broke his long spell of dismal reception, if he had continued on the blockbuster path. About how, after more than a hundred movies, that was the one where he finally felt fully seasoned. He remembers something an old friend would tell him.
“Sean Connery used to always say, ‘You have to know how to enter the room. When you’ve entered the room, they notice,’” he says. “In that movie, I thought I had entered the room.” Cage wants to keep going with the indies. “I enjoy making movies like Pig and Leaving Las Vegas more than I enjoy making movies like National Treasure,” he says. He waves away suggestions that National Treasure 3 is happening, after I mention that Jerry Bruckheimer told me they were developing something. “When I talk about fair-weather friends in Hollywood, I’m not talking about Jerry. I’m talking about Disney,” he says. “They’re like an ocean liner. Once they go in a certain direction, you’ve got to get a million tugboats to try to swivel it back around.”
He may reunite with his uncle for the first time since 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married— they’re talking about a small role in Coppola’s upcoming epic Megalopolis. “I’m just going to focus on being extremely selective, as selective as I can be,” he says. “I would like to make every movie as if it were my last.”
This article was shared with Prittle Prattle News as a Press Release.
