Nicolas Cage discusses the perfect action heroes: “I see a need in this genre for character”
There aren’t many stars who’ve won Academy Awards for their dramatic prowess before adding a gun-toting string to their bow by evolving into a bankable blockbuster action hero, but Nicolas Cage made it look effortless when he took a drastic pivot after reaching the apex of his career.
Plenty of Oscar-winning thespians have tried their luck at leading the line in an action-packed genre flick, but not many have mastered it. Denzel Washington is the most obvious example of somebody who conquered both worlds, but Sean Penn discovered it was much harder than it looked when his self-indulgent vanity project, The Gunman, crashed and burned.
Cage had worked his way up the ranks, distanced himself from his storied lineage by adopting a stage name independent of the Coppola dynasty, and was renowned as one of the most interesting, eccentric, and idiosyncratic leading men of his generation, an era that had a neat little bow tied around it when Leaving Las Vegas won him his Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
Embracing the need for change, Cage decided that he wanted to be a man of action. Many were sceptical of the unexpected detour, but when he headlined The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off within the space of 12 months – all three of which rank among the best of the decade – he couldn’t have justified it any better.
He’d have never succeeded as an action hero in the 1980s, an age when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone defined the larger-than-life and musclebound archetype, but things gradually started to change once Bruce Willis, Keanu Reeves, and Will Smith helped usher in the age of the charismatic everyman.
However, Cage didn’t look to any of his peers as inspiration, but three of the all-time greats. In fact, when it came to choosing his projects, he sought to emulate the legends who’d inspired him that action cinema is just as reliant on mining the depths of character to succeed as it was saving the world from an incoming threat that necessitated some bad guys be dispatched along the way.
Reflecting on how “the action/adventure genre is seen by more people than any other kind of movie in the world,” Cage channelled the spirit of his heroes to carve out a niche in a mainstream setting that he felt was being underserved by the majority of his contemporaries.
“I see a need in this genre for character,” he told David Sheff. “With the exceptions of Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, and Clint Eastwood, I don’t think actors in action movies have figured out how to do thoughtful characters. The others are the same stoic, monotone men who obliterate everybody and save the say. So, there is an opportunity to inject the character with flaws and depth. That’s what I’m going for.”
It can’t be said he didn’t succeed. The Rock‘s Stanley Goodspeed is a newly engaged scientist who finds himself way out of his depth, Con Air‘s mulleted Cameron Poe only wants to get back to his family, and Face/Off‘s Sean Archer wants to repossess his own visage so that those closest to him can finally put their trauma behind them and move forward.
Ford, Connery, and Eastwood were always beaten, battered, and bruised by the time they saved the day, a path that Cage wanted to follow. Obviously, he’s made some amount of crap in the genre, but that period between 1996 and 1997 was nonetheless a golden one that placed him on the same pedestal as his influences.
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