“I don’t act. I feel, and I imagine, and I channel”: The inspirations that made Nicolas Cage an icon
It’s not as if Nicolas Cage suddenly woke up one day and decided that he was going to create his own entirely unique approach to acting, but it happened anyway after the ambitious performer cherrypicked a range of eclectic influences to serve as the basis to a method completely unlike anybody else to have ever stepped under the bright lights of a movie set.
It’s a singular style that’s served as the basis for a career spanning over 40 years, one that’s yielded an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, a string of box office hits, an array of diverse classics, and a volume of memes, soundbites, and bizarre stories that’s almost beyond the levels of human comprehension.
Quite simply, there’s never been a thespian that’s ever viewed acting through the same lens as Cage, and there probably never will be again. Every performer has their own tricks, traits, quirks, and foibles that become a regular part of their on-screen oeuvre, but Hollywood’s favourite eccentric wildman has curated something entirely singular that can’t be replicated by anybody else.
Ethan Hawke once described Cage as “the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting,” which becomes increasingly apparent in his influences. One of his most notable touchstones was Kabuki, a stylised form of Japanese theatre that existed long before cinema, and regularly featured intentionally showy, over-the-top performances that were meant to convey emotions to an audience who hadn’t yet been graced with the technological advancements that allowed them to experience a performance on a 20-foot tall screen.
In Cage’s own words, “I don’t act. I feel, and I imagine, and I channel”. That sounds pretentious on the surface, but it’s completely applicable to his bespoke approach. Dubbing it ‘Nouveau Shamanism’, the star explained how his inspirations stretch thousands of years into the past as far back as pre-Christian times, where “the medicine men or the tribal shamans were really actors.” In his view, “they would act out and try to find the answers or go into a trance or go into another dimension, which is really just the imagination,” which does admittedly explain a lot.
In terms of specific people, Cage has previously named James Cagney and James Dean – specifically his performance in East of Eden – as having a hugely transformative effect on his view of cinema, although he’s been more than happy to dive into an entirely bizarre list of names, faces, and titles to enhance whatever role he’s playing at the time.
His Charlie Bodell in Peggy Sue Got Married got his voice from Pokey, the sidekick of claymation character Gumby. Moonstruck‘s Ronny Cammareri was based in part on Fritz Lang’s seminal sci-fi Metropolis, Raising Arizona’s H.I. McDunnough was brought to life in part by Cage combining Tex Avery cartoons with early German expressionism, while he named an array of figures as being pivotal to his transformation into Dracula in horror comedy Renfield, a list that included David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Christopher Lee, and even his own father.
“After I went through my method phase, which was like Brando and Dean and De Niro, I discovered these Old World actors,” he once said to The Washington Post, “and they were using these larger-than-life gestures to make up for lack of sound. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really wonderfully abstract and poetic,’ and I wanted to incorporate them into modern filmmaking.” That illustrates how he was simultaneously shaped by the greats that came before him, but dug even deeper into the very essence of performing to find something he could call his own.
However, developing such a style like no other came with its own set of issues. “The problem with that was that people wouldn’t get it,” Cage admitted. “Unless the character was insane.” Fortunately, that’s exactly what was expected of him once he’d carved out his niche as the fully dedicated, intensely committed, and inimitably offbeat purveyor of performances that nobody else would dare try, which ultimately became both his stock-in-trade and one of his defining characteristics.
