The actor Nicolas Cage fell in love with who thought he was an asshole: “Cut it out”
It’s a fact of life in Hollywood that you may not always like everyone you work with. This is especially true for actors, some of whom are tortured creative types who can be notoriously flighty and difficult. Of course, others can be jerks, and some actors’ personalities simply clash. Amusingly, the story of Nicolas Cage and an actor he worked with in the 1980s is all of the above, but with the added twist that Cage thought they were in love, whereas she just thought he was an asshole.
In 1986, Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married roared to box office success and three Academy Award nominations. The film tells the story of a woman teetering on the brink of divorce who is transported back in time to her senior year in high school, where she effectively gets a do-over of her relationship with her husband, Charlie.
While the film was well-received, and Turner nabbed a ‘Best Actress’ nomination for her performance as Peggy Sue, Nicolas Cage’s portrayal of Charlie was a bit more controversial. He wore false teeth and adopted a bizarre nasal vocal tone for the character, which he said was inspired by the cartoon character Pokey from The Gumby Show.
In 2018, Cage admitted to The Guardian that he was lucky his uncle Francis directed Peggy Sue Got Married because otherwise he mightn’t have been allowed to try something so strange with his performance. However, he added, “I think Kathleen was amused. I think we were a little bit in love with each other, to be entirely honest.”
Unfortunately for Cage, he was either remembering the experience of making the film incorrectly or ignoring all the bad blood between him and Turner over the years. For example, in her 2008 memoir, she wrote, “He caused so many problems. He was arrested twice for drunk driving and, I think, once for stealing a dog. He’d come across a chihuahua he liked and stuck it in his jacket.” She added, “Nicolas didn’t manage to kill the film, but he didn’t add a lot to it, either. For years, whenever I saw him, he’d apologise for his behaviour. I’d say, ‘Look, I’m way over it.'”
Cage sued Turner over these allegations, claiming defamation, libel, and slander. His lawsuit also encompassed the Daily Mail, which had published this book snippet, and Headline Publishing Group. Ultimately, Cage’s lawyer announced, “both publishing groups had acknowledged Turner’s claims to be untrue.”
That wasn’t the end of things, though. A few months before Cage’s Guardian interview, Turner took another couple of shots at him while speaking to Vulture. When asked about his vocal choice in the film, she grumbled, “It was tough to not say, ‘Cut it out’. But it wasn’t my job to say to another actor what he should or shouldn’t do.”
Turner revealed that she was so perturbed by Cage’s choices that she approached Coppola to confirm that he’d given his nephew the go-ahead. She confessed, “It was very touchy. He was very difficult on set. But the director allowed what Nicolas wanted to do with his role, so I wasn’t in a position to do much except play with what I’d been given.”
Ultimately, though, Cage’s frustratingly bizarre decision to play a normal man like a green hunk of cartoon clay may have benefitted Turner. In fact, she wondered if the fact she was so aggravated by him wound up contributing to her performance. She mused, “If anything, it only further illustrated my character’s disillusionment with the past. The way I saw it was, ‘Yeah, he was that asshole.'”
