Thespis
About the roles Nicolas Cage has turned down: He says the way he selects roles isn’t foolproof, but he’s got it down to a science. The key is a great director and a story he can get behind.
“You hope that you have a great director, or a director that you have a communication with, that he or she will be able to collaborate with you and guide you. But predominantly, it’s the story, the script itself,” he says. “I need to have a connection to the character that I feel I have the life experience to play the part organically or authentically — that I understand the character and I have the reservoir, if you will, of emotion, through my own life experiences, that I can tell this story or play this part.”
He doesn’t mind being called an actor. “Actor is what I am,” he says.
But he wants to make one thing clear — and to do so, he tells me the story of Thespis, who was, according to Greek tradition, the very first actor.
“He broke from the chorus and started to narrate what was happening to the characters. And to me, that implied authentic storytelling. So I just wanted to kind of get away from the idea of acting as artificial or a lie,” he says. “What it really is, is trying to access your emotions so truthfully that you can embody or inform a character where people aren’t seeing a lie as much as they’re seeing genuine, true emotion. And I think Pig was a good example of that.
“That movie was kismet for me, because it doesn’t happen often that you capture lightning in a bottle. It’s maybe happened twice with the other actors and filmmakers. One was Leaving Las Vegas, and the other is Pig, where you don’t do more than one or two takes, it’s just flowing,” he adds. “Sometimes it’s outside even the realm of thought — it’s just an instinct, an intuition, and it’s just happening, and it’s almost effortless.”
Cage hasn’t been behind the camera himself since his 2002 directorial debut Sonny, starring James Franco as a sex worker turned military man who yearns to break free of the life chosen for him by his madam-slash-mother. Cage is itching to get back to directing, and he knows exactly what genre he’d pick.
“Sonny was a kind of a family drama about outlaws, but I do want to find something that can hopefully give me a chance to express myself in my favorite genre, which is the family drama.”
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent director Tom Gormican. Photo by Elisabeth Caren / Lionsgate
Some of his favorite examples are Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son.
“What I would love to try to aspire to do is tell stories that people can relate to, and hopefully pull your heartstrings in some way,” Cage says.
Of the over 100 movies that Cage has acted in, which characters did he identify with the most?
“The one that is most like me, I think, is the character I played in David Gordon Green’s Joe. That’s the one that I felt like I really didn’t have to perform at all,” he said. “The feelings that that character had as far as it pertains to his relationship with Tye Sheridan’s character in the movie were feelings that I’ve felt and expressed in my own life with my boys,” he said. “I would say Joe and Pig were the two most alike, truthful essences of my own persona, at least as far as I relate to myself.”
In Joe, Cage plays a small-town, working-class man with a heart of gold, but whose struggle with self-restraint when provoked keeps him at odds with the law. He’s the type of character who knows how to gut a deer carcass and remove a bullet from his own shoulder with nothing but a bottle of booze to sterilize the wound. He’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside; he’ll smash in a bad guy’s skull at a moment’s notice, but also gets concerned that Sheridan’s character, Gary, will catch a cold when he shows up on his doorstep in a rainstorm.
Cage’s character in Pig is similar. At first, he comes off as gruff and prickly, refusing to say much. But as time goes on, it becomes clear that the reason he’s retreated away from civilization is that he feels too much, not too little.
And as you may have noticed, he likes to make big choices with his roles.
“The stylizations on the more operatic choices in film performance, as far as it pertains to German expressionism or Western Kabuki or Nouveau Shamanism or whatever you want to call it, I think Vampire’s Kiss, Face/Off, Ghostrider and even Prisoners of the Ghostland — these are movies that really gave me a chance to branch out into a clear choice about style of film performance,” he says.
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“Those movies have a lot of meaning for me in that regard. And I do think that comedy has been an important element in terms of staying interested in this path that I’ve chosen in cinema that I didn’t always want. I am a dramatic actor, those are my roots, drama is my root, and that is my base. But comedy has given me a chance to, in a way, illuminate both sides. And so I was thankful that after doing something like Pig, I could do Massive Talent and do some comedy.”
These days, Cage is doing rather well for himself. Any kooky tidbit about his life or work will, of course, make him once again the talk of the internet — Cage holds a power that can’t be bottled and that many clamor to possess. With that power comes the promise of a new meme lurking around every corner, but it’s a small price to pay.
I can’t help but hope that Cage is aware of the overwhelmingly benevolent force that drives the sentiment at the heart of his memefication. For every gif of his luscious Con-Air locks blowing in the wind, for every cartoon rendering of his face pasted onto the bodies of Disney princesses, there is, at the root, an earnest, widely held belief that Nicolas Cage wasn’t just in National Treasure — he is one.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, starring Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage, opens in theaters on April 22, from Lionsgate.
Main Image: Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent courtesy of Lionsgate
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