How Nicolas Cage’s favourite method acting performances inspired his unique style
One of the more fascinating leading men of his generation, Nicolas Cage grew up daydreaming about filmmaking, and has spent his career making seemingly as many films as he can, determined to not be defined by one particular type or genre, instead showing a steady stream of performances that are unique and can only be defined as ‘Nic Cage’.
He’s spoken about finding inspiration in the westerns and action films of his childhood, citing Charles Bronson, Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood all as the actors he was aspiring to become like.
As a young actor, Cage struggled with the weight of the assumptions that his success was due to his name, Coppola (Cage being a stage name), and his relation to famous Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. Cage would say, “My fellow actors didn’t accept me,” when recounting that as early as his time on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the actor would feel ridiculed by his cast mates and made to feel like he really had “something to prove”.
Perhaps this early desire to make a name for himself based on performance rather than association has made Cage so interested in the deeper research and method of acting that he chooses to follow.
At 19, he would have his own teeth pulled to better connect with the pain of the character he was playing in Birdy, a young soldier in the Vietnam War who becomes the lone survivor of a helicopter crash, leaving his face severely injured and bandaged. Cage would keep these bandages on, while not on set and found that the reactions he faced fascinated him, and caused him to further embody the mindset of the role he was playing.
This commitment, coupled with stories like that of Cage and Jim Carrey allegedly trapping a room-service waiter in their room while making the 1986 comedy Peggy Sue Got Married. Cage insists that the story was blown out of proportion and that everyone involved knew it was a joke, but goes on to mention that at the time, he was “doing what I thought my heroes would do.” The actor would mention inspirations like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant and Robert De Niro as the push behind wanting to “make stories for myself” and create a mythology around himself.
In preparation for Con Air, Cage would visit Folsom State Prison in order to do research for his role. The actor said his adrenaline was running high as he was surrounded by “3000 killers”. When asking one inmate how they stay alive, the response of “You’ve just gotta get hectic,” seems like one that Cage took to heart for the film.
Cage admits he likes “pushing things past the limit,” when it comes to his performances, citing the ways in which Marlon Brando would lie “on a block of ice so that he would be shivering the shivers of death” for his death scene in Mutiny on the Bounty, or the “40 or 50 pounds” DeNiro gained to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull — “That kind of stuff. That reckless, adventurous style was fun and fascinating”.
Cage himself has been demonstrating his transformative abilities again recently, with a heavily makeup-ed role in Longlegs being celebrated for its truly haunting presence.
