The Nicolas Cage performance inspired by Humphrey Bogart: “A certain style”
Nicolas Cage is an actor known to take inspiration for his performances from some far-flung places. Brilliantly, though, unlike many actors, he’s perfectly willing to tell people what those influences are. He doesn’t seem to have any issue revealing that he takes elements of other actors, fictional characters, cartoons, and even animals to inform his characters; he simply runs them all through the prism of Cage to arrive at something unique.
Fittingly, when he signed up to play an animated character in a kid’s film in 2018, he was upfront that his biggest inspiration was film noir icon Humphrey Bogart, and a couple of other actors from that period in Hollywood history.
When Cage met with animation directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman in downtown Los Angeles, he was immediately intrigued by the project they pitched him. In 2018, he told Hey U Guys, “They showed me what the movie was going to look like, and I thought it was going to be a beautiful, visual feast.”
The movie was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and the directors envisioned it as a pioneering piece of work that would push animation forward. It would combine traditional computer animation with hand-drawn comic book-style art intentionally reminiscent of Marvel Comics artist Sara Pichelli. She was the co-creator of Miles Morales, the alternate universe Spider-Man that the movie would focus on, and the team wanted to ensure her style shone through in the final animation.
Once they knew they had impressed Cage with the movie’s visuals, the directors pitched his part in the film. They wanted him to play Spider-Man Noir, the black trenchcoat-wearing private investigator version of Spider-Man from a black-and-white alternate universe permanently stuck in the shadowy gloom of 1930s noir. Cage was immediately intrigued and began cycling through ideas in his head of what this character could sound like.
“I had already done Dog Eat Dog with Paul Schrader,” revealed Cage, “where I was playing with a Humphrey Bogart kind of style and affectation. I thought Spider-Man Noir could be fun to think about the voice as being almost like a 1930s noir film star.” Cage didn’t just want his noir voice to be an impression of a legend like Bogart, though, so he did what he always liked to do – ran a bunch of inspirations through his Cageification process. He mixed elements of James Cagney and Edward G Robinson’s voices with Bogart’s – essentially, “any of these guys that talked fast and had a certain style and a rhythm to their delivery.”
When Into the Spider-Verse was released, it introduced legions of kids to a new hero, received rave reviews, made nearly $400million at the box office, and won the Academy Award for ‘Best Animated Feature.’ A sequel followed in 2023, but Cage didn’t return as Spider-Man Noir, leaving many fans disappointed.
Amazingly, though, something else was in the works which may prove even better than Cage reprising the role in animation. At Amazon’s Upfronts presentation in May 2024, it was announced that Cage would return to the role of Spider-Man Noir, but it would be in a live-action television series. An actor originating a role in animation and then moving into live-action is extremely rare, and fans will no doubt await the show with bated breath.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Cage described the series as “a Pop-art mashup, like a Lichtenstein painting, where I want to do something that has some sparkle to it. It’s fun to look at.” He indicated that the show will likely mix noir with an old-fashioned pulp adventure tone, revealing, “One of the things that I like about this potential show is that it’s fantasy. It’s not really people beating people up. Monsters are involved.”
