Revision as of 10:27, 22 October 2020

Nicolas Cage needs to work, but not necessarily for the reasons you and I need to work. At 56, the owner of one of the most eclectic filmographies in Hollywood history just can’t seem to slow down. Arsenal, Vengeance: A Love Story, Inconceivable, Mom and Dad, The Humanity Bureau, Dark, Mandy, Looking Glass, 211, Between Worlds, A Score to Settle, Color Out of Space, Running with the Devil, Kill Chain, Primal, Grand Isle. All released within the last three years, all featuring Cage in try-anything mode. Whether he’s teetering on the verge of mania or whipping himself into a campy frenzy, Cage is acting with the abandon of someone who has nothing left to prove. With good reason.

A descendant of cinema royalty (his uncle is the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola), Cage forged a path in the mold of the larger-than-life movie stars he grew up watching. But where they may have zigged, Cage zagged: first as a chiseled teen heartthrob in ’80s fare including Valley Girl, Rumble Fish, and Peggy Sue Got Married; then as the wickedly charming lead in auteurist oddities such as the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart; then as an Oscar winner for his role as an emotionally vacant alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas; then as an action star in blow- ’em-ups such as Con Air, The Rock, Face/Off, Gone in 60 Seconds, and National Treasure. And now, against the backdrop of his B-movie bonanza, he enters, well, his Nick Cage metaphase: as Joe Exotic, otherwise known as the Tiger King, in a new miniseries based on the incarcerated, heavy-drug-using, polyamorous big-cat owner made famous by Netflix, and as a cash-strapped version of himself in next year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. His days at the top of the box office largely behind him—he was once one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, earning $40 million in 2009— speculation about his career choices persist: Is he paying off debts? Is he supporting his taste for rare artifacts? Is he just bored? As he tells his friend, the musician Marilyn Manson, the answer is as complicated as it is simple.

NICOLAS CAGE: I’m very excited that you’re interviewing me, especially since we’ve known each other for so many years.

MARILYN MANSON: The first time we met was nebulous, because we had several encounters. One of the most memorable encounters was when you bought my first painting at my first art show. You are a collector of many different things, art being one of them. We’ve talked about the living and dead creatures you’ve accumulated throughout your fascination with the unknown and things that are of unexplainable origin. Do you collect things as trophies, or is it something you connect with your childhood?

CAGE: Certainly not as trophies. It’s a way to get things to crack, to open my imagination. It’s been like that for a very long time. It happened just by watching episodes of Rod Serling’s [horror anthology series] Night Gallery. I think those were the beginnings of me trying to understand larger-than-life performance, because many of the actors in those shows were acting in a way that was not necessarily natural, but terrifying. Sometimes, if I don’t know how to play apart, I can refer to a Francis Bacon image, or I can read a bit of poetry, and it triggers something in my mind that creates a feeling, so that I don’t have to act. I think that’s what art, for me, is really about. Animals, too. That’s why I like to surround myself with reptiles and fish and cats. I just bought a crow. His name is Huginn, after one of [the Norse god] Odin’s two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, and he’s amazing.