The “brutally real” actor who always blows Nicolas Cage away
If you were to use one word to sum up Nicholas Cage’s acting style, it would probably be ‘intense’. The Longlegs star is a national treasure in and of himself—endlessly entertaining to watch, he’s the kind of actor that makes even downright bad films enjoyable to watch. The Coppola nephew beat the nepotism baby allegations by giving each role he played his absolute all. The actor has had a long-running career, sharing the screen with all kinds of Hollywood royalty: Helen Mirren, Frances McDormand, Ving Rhames and John Travolta, to name a few.
One star he heaped considerable praise on was an actor occupying the opposite end of the ‘intense’ spectrum: The Right Stuff’s Ed Harris. Cage and Harris acted alongside each other just twice. Once in Michael Bay’s The Rock, Harris played a disillusioned US Brigadier taking hostages and threatening the city of San Francisco with nuclear weapons. Cage played the FBI chemical weapons specialist who teams up with Sean Connery to take him down. The two, regrettably, shared very little screen time. Cage said about Harris: “He’s one of those actors that’s brutally real on film and you can’t help but be blown away by his talent because of that.”
He pointed out two specific performances that left him stunned. The first was Harris’ display as Jackson Pollock in Pollock – a film Harris himself directed. This was a passion project for the actor, who spent ten years in development. “It was non-stop. It was very exhilarating. It was also very demanding and exhausting, but I didn’t want anyone else to direct the film. I had worked on it long and hard and felt very intimate with it,” Harris said about the picture, which earned him an Oscar nomination.
The 40-day shoot was one that almost pushed him to his breaking point and led to him directing several scenes still in character. He had so thoroughly embodied Pollack, gaining 30lbs, growing a beard, and doing all the painting himself, that he found it difficult to let go of the character. Harris is known for ‘going method’, but nobody can scoff at that given the kinds of performances it’s led to.
The other film Cage points to is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence – the film in which Harris plays a one-eyed gangster tormenting Viggo Mortensen’s family life after he’s apparently left behind a life of crime. Harris’ portrayal of Carl Fogarty is haunting – he’s suave, murderous, and a distillation of pure chaos. A performance that encapsulates the searing intensity that Cage so admires in Harris. Every time the character shows up on screen, he’s accompanied by either blood or a red flashing light that seems to indicate that he could easily explode into a fit of violence at any moment.
As a big fan of the actor, Cage was stoked to work with him again on the National Treasure sequel: “So when they said he was in the movie,” he said. “I knew we had the possibility of making something very, very exciting.” Exciting, indeed, as Harris played the antagonistic black market dealer who makes a brave sacrifice at one of the film’s highest points.
Harris is most recently seen in Rose Glass’ underrated body horror love story, Love Lies Bleeding. Harris plays Lou Sr, the estranged, criminal father of Kristen Stewart’s Lou. With his penchant for the brutal on full display, he perfectly matches the film’s tone and is one of 2024’s best on-screen villains. The man’s still got it.
