The 10 most unhinged performances of Nicolas Cage
Having recently hinted that retirement could be lurking just around the corner, the unmistakable on-screen antics of Nicolas Cage should be enjoyed while he’s still out there doing his entirely unique thing.
The actor has implied that he might only have a few more features left in the tank before exploring other creative avenues, but he’s already left behind one of the most fascinating legacies of any major star, which he’s accomplished by marching almost entirely to the beat of his own drum.
Evolving from the eccentric darling of independent cinema into an Academy Award-winning and widely-respected thespian, he then pivoted into becoming a blockbuster action hero before money troubles saw him sign on for virtually every project that came his way. Through it all, though, he’s never given any less than 100%.
Cage doesn’t want memes to be what people remember most about his contributions to the world of cinema, but when you’ve been as unhinged for as long as he has and won the plaudits to back it up, it’ll be hard to outrun that shadow. That being said, the following ten turns showcase Cage at his grandstanding best, even when there’s barely a shred of scenery left behind that hasn’t been chewed.
10 most unhinged Nicolas Cage performances:
10. Mom and Dad (Brian Taylor, 2017)
Having evidently enjoyed working with co-director Brian Taylor on the otherwise woeful superhero sequel Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Cage re-teamed with the filmmaker when he flew solo on the deranged horror comedy Mom and Dad.
Taylor was one half of the duo responsible for Jason Statham’s delightfully maniacal Crank duology – which were essentially video game beat ’em ups that weren’t adapted from video games – and that subversion was channelled once again in what’s effectively a zombie flick with no sign of the undead.
A mysterious signal suddenly finds suburban parents gripped by the desire to murder their children, which opens the door for Cage to go big and broad while still sneaking in some nuanced character work. He and Selma Blair play a financially struggling married couple trying to maintain the illusion of a happy family despite their various issues, injecting pathos into a raucous premise.
The peak comes when Cage destroys a pool table with a sledgehammer while screaming ‘The Hokey Pokey’ at the top of his lungs, made all the more remarkable by the fact it stands out as the highlight of a film that spends its final two acts watching him try to kill his offspring with a maniacal grin etched on his face.
9. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)
Partnering up with Werner Herzog was always going to guarantee fireworks, with Cage delivering the goods as a drug-addled police officer who struggles to maintain his ever-loosening grip on both sanity and reality while investigating a string of murders.
The narrative begins as a fairly routine procedural thriller but soon morphs into a character study that finds Cage balancing introspection and psychedelic lunacy with effortless ease. He threatens old people with firearms, witnesses the soul of a dead body breakdancing, and experiences reptilian hallucinations.
Devouring confiscated narcotics to feed his addiction, Cage’s approach to playing Terence McDonagh can be summed up by the character’s glass-half-full view on his addictions: “Everything I take is prescription, except for the heroin.” Unsurprisingly, Herzog proved to be a phenomenally complementary conduit for his unique interpretation of a troublesome cop.
8. Zandalee (Sam Pillsbury, 1991)
Sporting flowing locks and a goatee to complement an overexaggerated Louisiana accent offers some indication of what Zandalee has in store for those with a soft spot for Cage’s signature brand of histrionics, all wrapped up in an erotic thriller that wasn’t even released theatrically in the United States.
The star’s free-spirited artist deals in self-gratification and peddles cocaine as a side hustle, with his artistic calling revolving around the meaning of lust. Fortunately for him, he finds it after embarking on a tumultuous and steamy affair with the wife of his long-time friend.
Becoming increasingly self-destructive, things reach a head when Cage’s Johnny Collins suffers a drug-fuelled meltdown that sees him tear one of his freshly completed canvases to shreds before dousing himself head-to-toe in black paint. Zandalee is far from a good movie, but the actor’s bravura showmanship and scenery-devouring antics come impressively close to elevating it single-handedly.
7. Willy’s Wonderland (Kevin Lewis, 2021)
The genuine feature-length adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s left a lot to be desired, especially when Cage had already exploded onto the scene and grabbed the concept of a horror movie predicated on anthropomorphised animatronic mascots going rogue by the horns and pummelled it into dust.
The core conceit of watching Cage battle for survival after being trapped in an indoor amusement arcade by a cabal of hulking critters inhabited by the spirits of a satanic cult who committed a suicide pact is ludicrous enough as it is, but having his character remain completely silent for the entire duration is borderline genius.
A key part of the actor’s appeal has always been his unique line delivery and habit of luxuriating on the most random of syllables, but without any spoken dialogue whatsoever, he still conspires to deliver a wordless tour de force that relies entirely on his physicality and facial expressions. Willy’s Wonderland will no doubt endure as a midnight cult favourite for years to come, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that wouldn’t happen with anybody else in the lead role.
6. Sonny (Nicolas Cage, 2002)
It’s unclear why Cage opted to make his directorial debut on a street-level drama telling the story of a male prostitute-turned-soldier hitting the streets to follow in the family business his mother still occupies and then never direct again, although it might have something to do with his cameo being the only memorable thing about Sonny.
James Franco plays the title role, with the director showing up as a lascivious pimp called Acid Yellow, who seemingly exists for the sole purpose of getting the film’s biggest selling point onto the screen at any cost. Without anyone to rein him in, though, Cage’s guest spot sits completely adjacent to the tone of everything that happened up to that point.
Taking on a southern-fried accent and wearing a prosthetic nose for no discernible reason, it almost goes completely unnoticed that he’s also wearing what might be the most ridiculous bright yellow suit that’s ever been tailored; such is the jarring nature of his short-lived contribution.
5. Prisoners of the Ghostland (Sion Sono, 2021)
Without a shadow of a doubt, the single greatest delivery of the word “testicles” in the history of cinema came when Cage screamed it at the top of his voice for as long as possible in Sion Sono’s demented post-apocalyptic thriller.
Of course, subtlety was never to be expected in a dystopian neo-Western where the actor plays a protagonist quite literally called Hero, who wears a leather jumpsuit rigged with explosives at the arms, legs, and crotch after being tasked by the warlord of a place called Samurai Town to rescue his kidnapped granddaughter in exchange for his freedom.
He rides a tiny bicycle made for children, misquotes Hamlet, and encounters radioactive convicts and people transformed into human mannequins, which all comes before he throws on a Mad Max-inspired helmet to start dismembering a raft of enemies with a sharpened blade haphazardly attached to the stump where his hand used to be.
4. Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)
If there was one well-known star above all that seems as if they’d be tailor-made for a brutal, blood-soaked, and phantasmagorical action-packed horror movie, then it would be foolish to consider anyone other than Cage as being at the top of that list.
Proving that sentiment true with plenty of panache and a staggeringly committed performance, Mandy offers up a rampage of revenge that channels giallo, punk rock, psychedelia, slashers, S&M, and plenty more besides as the actor’s Red Miller takes on a sadomasochistic cult.
Downing a bottle of vodka and screaming at the heavens over his predicament, Cage eventually finds solace in violence, a path of retribution that requires crossbows, chainsaws, a hand-forged sword, and body parts strewn across the screen before it reaches an otherworldly conclusion.
3. Vampire’s Kiss (Robert Bierman, 1988)
Even people who haven’t seen Vampire’s Kiss will be able to instantly recognise one frame of the movie in particular, which has taken on the near-mythical status of being arguably the definitive Cage meme.
It’s a testament to just how wildly he swings for the fences that the moment in question isn’t even the apex of his performative insanity. Then again, his Peter Loew does spend the majority of the running time becoming increasingly convinced that he’s a vampire, so restraint was never really an option.
Sometimes, getting the point of his newfound existence across requires a cheap set of vampire teeth, running through the streets screeching about how he really is a member of the bloodsucking undead, the eating of a live cockroach, crawling under office furniture, screaming the alphabet at his therapist, or deciding to enunciate words at the most unlikely points in any given sentence.
This was fairly early on in his career, too, with Vampire’s Kiss marking the first sight of Cage taking his love of expressionism and avant-garde cinema to a mass audience, in what would soon become entrenched as the habit of a lifetime.
2. The Wicker Man (Neil LaBute, 2006)
Cage remains adamant to this day that he and director Neil LaBute deliberately crafted an absurdist black comedy as opposed to an unintentional misfire of a disastrous remake, but his performance can’t be questioned for its lunacy regardless of which side of the fence anyone falls.
Running around in a bear suit and punching women in the face, seemingly operating in an entirely different creative headspace to every single other actor in the film, or his internet-embraced terror at being tortured and burned alive while wearing a helmet full of bees, The Wicker Man is certainly something.
Viewed as the reinvention of a folk horror masterpiece, it’s awful. However, by taking Cage at his word and interpreting it as a surreptitious $40 million experiment backed by a major studio and designed to be intentionally terrible by its two biggest creative driving forces, it’s a nonsensical work of cinematic subversion on the grandest scale.
1. Deadfall (Christopher Coppola, 1993)
Nepotism ran wild in the dismal Deadfall, with co-writer and director Christopher Coppola assembling a star-studded cast that featured his aunt Talia Shire, Michael Biehn, Peter Fonda, Charlie Sheen, and James Coburn, to name but a small few.
It’s his brother that was responsible for the only highlight of an otherwise universally-panned vanity project, though, with Cage’s pearly white veneers, porn star moustache, loud shirts, and unconvincing toupee handily overpowering by whatever it is he was doing with his performance.
He does drugs, huffs poppers, karate kicks people with no rhyme or reason, as well as sinking his teeth into such lines as “Hi-fucking-ya,” and “Well, Viva la fucking France, man.” It feels as if he’s been parachuted in from an entirely different planet, never mind another movie, but even more incomprehensibly, Cage would reprise the role of Eddie King 14 years later in bargain basement thriller Arsenal. Why? Nobody knows, and it was never explained.
