Did Nicolas Cage’s “racist” method acting really cause a fight on the set of ‘The Cotton Club’?
In the nascent years of his movie career, Nicolas Cage‘s struggles to establish his identity in Hollywood were the stuff of legend. It was an open secret that he was The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, and that he’d changed his stage name to ‘Cage’ to avoid accusations of nepotism. However, the hopeful actor didn’t help this perception by accepting roles in three of his uncle’s films in that period: Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, and Peggy Sue Got Married.
Key to Cage’s struggle for identity in this era, though, was that he always believed his uncle – and, by extension, the rest of Hollywood – didn’t take him seriously as an actor. Cage once described the Coppola family as “loaded with grudges and passion” and claimed there was “a fundamental competitive edge amongst the men in my family”. Ultimately, it took him a long time to convince his uncle to let him audition for one of his films, let alone cast him in anything.
This love-hate relationship with his family, coupled with his borderline insane commitment to proving himself as an actor in the mould of his idols Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, led to Cage spending much of the early ’80s doing whatever he could to push his craft to extremes. In fact, he wanted to be like Brando and De Niro so much that he employed many of the worst impulses of method acting in several of his early roles.
In 1984, Cage went full method in the World War II romantic drama Racing with the Moon alongside fellow young method devotee Sean Penn. He then pushed it even further in Birdy, an oddball drama about two friends traumatised by their experiences in Vietnam. Cage wore bandages on his face for the entire four-week shoot because his character had been wounded in the war. He also told the press that he ordered a dentist to pull two of his teeth so he could understand his character’s pain. In reality, he needed the dental work done and scheduled it to coincide with the film, but his version of the story sounded suitably more dramatic.
However, to the relief of everyone around him, Cage’s brief flirtation with method acting met its end on the set of The Cotton Club. His uncle granted him a minor role in that 1930s gangster film as the vicious Irish-American hitman Vincent Dwyer, based on the brutal real-life figure Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll. Cage dutifully began to inhabit the maniacal character on and off set, insisting everyone called him Vince and flying into a rage if they didn’t; gleefully scaring his castmates; destroying his trailer; and denting the expensive vintage automobiles the production had assembled with angry kicks to pump himself up.
Unfortunately, The Cotton Club was such a bloated, troubled production that Cage wound up living like a homicidal gangster for months on end as the film’s schedule kept ballooning. This took a psychological toll on the actor, yet he still wouldn’t drop his obsession with ‘the method’. Crew members felt he was “an amazing asshole” and “very abusive”, but Cage claimed his behaviour boiled down to exasperation.
“I was slated for three weeks of work,” Cage later told Playboy. “I was there for six months, in costume, in makeup, on the set, in case Francis got an idea for my character. Meanwhile, I’m getting offers for starring roles in other movies, and I can’t do them. So, my behaviour, all the acting out, came from frustration.”
Interestingly, the actor and his representatives have consistently denied the rumoured worst example of Cage’s method antics while shooting The Cotton Club. For years, it was suggested that he took things too far by adopting the same racist attitudes and verbiage as his despicable character when the cameras weren’t rolling.
During a scene set in an all-Black jazz club, the extras casting director Aleta Chappelle alleged to How Coppola Became Cage author Zach Schonfeld that Cage improvised with one of the extras, but used the N-word in the process. “The guy almost beat the hell out of him for doing it,” Chapelle claimed. “This guy was an ex-vet, and it just triggered everything for him. It was a terrible incident on-set. That was just too far. Everybody knew it was too far. Everybody was very upset.”
Chappelle claimed the shoot had to be stopped for a while, and the irate extra was removed from the set, even though he wasn’t in the wrong. For his part, Cage never publicly commented about the supposed altercation, but he did admit in a biography that he acted racist because his character was racist, which sounds dicey in and of itself. When Schonfeld contacted the actor to let him know the anecdote would be in his book, though, Cage replied through an intermediary.
“There were no fights on The Cotton Club set,” the spokesperson stated, “and he has no recollection of anything like that happening.”
Ultimately, Cage abandoned method acting soon after The Cotton Club, preferring to develop his own style, which he dubbed ‘Nouveau Shamanic’. Perhaps he realised that he flew too close to the sun with his Vincent Dwyer performance, and his utilisation of ‘the method’ simply resulted in madness.
