Nicolas Cage explains why he changed his name in the 1980s
When your family are one of the biggest names in Hollywood, it can be hard to live up to the expectations and the pressures that your name can bring. Yet, Nicolas Cage managed to break out of this feeling of named entrapment and defined a career that is utterly his own and is not reliant on his relatives.
The nephew of the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas starred in a number of successful films in the 1980s, including the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. While this period saw him being touted as a promising actor, his big arrival on the film scene would come in 1995, when Cage won the Academy Award for Best Actor in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas.
Cage’s portrayal of Ben Sanderson, the screenwriter turned biggest alcoholic you could possibly imagine, epitomised Cage’s approach to playing borderline crazy characters. Yet Cage’s success was not entirely on the shoulders of his family’s prior success in the industry, and he changed his name in the late 1970s so as to make his own way in the world.
“I had to reinvent myself,” Cage said. “I am still legally Nicolas Coppola, but I am Nicolas Cage. I love my family and all of their accomplishments, but as a young actor going into casting offices, I couldn’t get that off of me. I had to focus on the character and the audition, and there was pressure because of my name.”
He added, “As soon as I went into the casting office under a new name and they didn’t know that there was a connection and I got the part, I was like, ‘I can really do this.’ I felt liberated. It gave me the freedom to become what I wanted to be in my dreams.”
Cage’s distinctive acting style has brought some critics to accuse him of overacting. Yet Cage’s approach is something he refers to as “Nouveau Shamanic”, and his extreme acting methods have included him pulling out his own teeth without anaesthetic to induce pain, having hot yoghurt poured on his feet to get him sexually aroused for a scene and wearing bandages around his face for five weeks.
Cage also commented on the fact that though he talks of the liberation of his new name, the connotations of ‘Cage’ are of being trapped. He said, “It is ironic; I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was looking for a name that was unique but simple. I wanted people to remember an exotic name that was short and sweet, and Cage, to me, seemed right. “
He added, “Tom Cruise changed his name, we came up together, and I also liked the avant-garde composer John Cage. I thought it was interesting you had both sides, you know, you have the popcorn side and the more thoughtful side.”
