The Nicolas Cage performance inspired by House of Pain
To call Nicolas Cage a nutjob would be to call the ocean ‘wet’ or the Sun ‘hot’. It goes without saying. The maverick actor has made a career out of his unorthodox performances, cultivating a style entirely of his own and winning the hearts of millions of film lovers around the world in the process.
One of the Cage-iest parts of his act is to take inspiration from a range of unlikely sources. He famously based his interpretation of Johnny Blaze in the ‘Ghost Rider’ series on a mixture of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and a cobra. This isn’t the only time music has played a part in Cage’s research, as he explained whilst promoting his 2024 thriller The Surfer.
In conversation with Empire, the secret Coppola explained how he used a 1990s hip-hop classic to get into character. “I was listening to ‘Jump Around’ by House Of Pain,” he revealed. “For some reason, that song would come out when I was in my state of madness, when I was losing it at [the surfers] when they were torturing my character. It was just in my head.” He also announced that, if anyone made fun of him for getting too into the song, he would bark at them to join in until basically everyone on set was feeling the groove.
The film, which comes from Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan, features Cage as an unnamed man attempting to take his young son surfing on a beautiful Australian beach. Things turn ugly when the locals, led by Julian McMahon of ‘Fantastic Four’ fame, tell him that the beach isn’t for outsiders. Things quickly develop into an increasingly unhinged game of retaliation between the two sides, as Cage’s sanity begins to quickly unravel.
“It spoke to me,” Cage said of the project. “I’ve always believed that anyone can appear very normal and be very normal, but if you scratch the surface of that person long enough, the inner caveman’s coming out. That’s what I was meditating on. I wanted to show that ride: the humour of it, the sadness of it, the absurdity, the anger.” The Surfer received its global premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn’t released in most other territories until the following year. In the UK, the legendary Prince Charles cinema marked the occasion with a lookalike competition, which was just as mental as you’d expect.
Though it doesn’t feature directly in The Surfer, ‘Jump Around’ has its own rich cinematic history. The song, famous for its iconic ‘squeal’ sound, the track has featured in everything from The Rookie to Mrs. Doubtfire, Jack Reacher to Happy Gilmore. It’s one of those songs that most people know from the first few notes and, if you’re Nic Cage, might just inspire you to leap around like a lunatic whilst yelling at your co-workers.
Whether he’s channelling dancefloor rap, ’90s industrial metal, or any other form of music, Cage is always one step ahead of the game. He can see inspiration where others wouldn’t even think to look – the mark of a true artist always thinking about how he can go one better.
