The Nicolas Cage performance based on cobras and Trent Reznor
Good performance. Bad performance. These words don’t really mean anything when you’re talking about Hollywood’s favourite oddball, Nicolas Cage. The man has built a career on defying expectations of a big star. One minute, he’s winning an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. The next, he’s gargling madly in Vampire’s Kiss or freaking out audiences in Longlegs. Nic Cage takes unpredictability to a whole new level.
With a resumé as vast and varied as his, it’s fascinating to hear about what inspires the secret Coppola. As you’d expect, the answers to this are just as nutty as the performances themselves, as seen when Cage was asked about playing the Marvel superhero Ghost Rider.
Cage portrayed Johnny Blaze and his alter ego in two movies, Ghost Rider and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. When being interviewed for the latter by Movies, the actor revealed that two wildly different sources informed how his character moved. “I remembered cobra snakes because, at one point in my neighbourhood, I had a couple of them,” he said. “They would move back and forth in a rhythmic motion… and so I thought, well, why doesn’t the Ghost Rider move like that, with that sort of hypnotic rhythmic motion.”
This reptilian influence seemingly wasn’t enough, as Cage also borrowed from one of his fellow humans. “There was another thing that I’d seen in a Trent Reznor video where he was revolving and levitating in circles, and I thought, let’s have Ghost Rider levitate and revolve in circles.” It’s unclear what footage of the Nine Inch Nails frontman Cage is referring to here, but it clearly left a mark.
A well-known comic book fan, Cage clearly took preparing for this role very seriously. The interviewer asked him if his other half felt comfortable with him riding a dangerous motorcycle whilst in this intense frame of mind, to which he replied, “She loved it”.
“She thought it looked great. She thought I was a very sexy motorcycle and wanted to have a ride on it,” he clarified, possibly giving too much information. The bike that Ghost Rider rode in the movie was a modified Yamaha VMAX, which was called the Hellcycle. “I don’t have a contract with Yamaha, but I have had my experiences on several different motorcycles, and they’re the best,” said Cage before revealing that, for insurance purposes, he’s not allowed to ride bikes in real life. Suddenly, his work on two movies, in which he gets to ride around all day, makes a lot more sense.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance came out in 2011 and was not a hit. This was partially because the film suffered from a bad script and dodgy CGI but also because superhero movies were being held to a higher standard than ever because of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 2013, the rights to the character returned to Marvel Studios. Although Johnny Blaze hasn’t been seen in the MCU, Agents of SHIELD introduced the world to Robby Reyes, who also used the Ghost Rider moniker in the comics.
