Nicolas Cage and the strangest interview of all time
Thanks to his modern-day status as a living, breathing, walking, and talking online sensation, Nicolas Cage going off the rails has become a staple and widely accepted part of his persona. Things weren’t quite the same in the pre-internet age, though, with one notorious interview from 1990 finding him on manic form.
Before he was an A-list action hero, and even prior to his status as a celebrated Academy Award-winning performer, Cage was famed for being the eccentric and offbeat wild man of independent cinema, an actor who was as ferociously committed to his on-screen endeavours as he was to living a maverick and wayward lifestyle away from it.
To promote David Lynch’s romantic crime thriller Wild at Heart, Cage was invited to be a guest on the talk show Wogan, a decision host Terry Wogan would end up regretting. Announcing his arrival by bounding onto the stage and immediately doing a somersault, things only got more outlandish from there.
Cage then proceeded to start doing karate kicks and throwing money into the crowd before finally sitting down to be interviewed. He then removed his T-shirt and handed it to Wogan halfway through. Shirtless and caked in sweat, their chat did at least manage to go relatively uninterrupted from then on out, but not without featuring one of the most unexpectedly intense incidents the talk show format had ever experienced.
Wogan was constantly asked about his infamous Cage interview for the remainder of his career to intertwine the two forevermore, with the actor admitting to Empire that “I don’t think Mr. Wogan was too amused”. However, he interpreted it as a positive after stating that “as his career continued to be as illustrious as it was, he was kind of proud of it too”.
Underselling himself as “a little worked up” when he’d made the most maniacal of entrances, Cage offered an insight into his own mindset when he informed Wogan that if he hadn’t become an actor, then his “need to do crazy things” may well have manifested itself as criminality after he voiced his enthusiasm for “the idea of robbing banks”.
In typical Cage fashion, though, his unhinged outing on Wogan would serve as one of the inspirations behind a performance he wouldn’t give for another 30 years when he played a heightened version of himself in the meta action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Having “looked at an old interview I did on the Wogan show where I was front handspringing”, he realised that not only was that version of Cage “a really obnoxious, arrogant, irreverent, mad man”, it was also one that “needs to be in this movie”. For the sequences where he plays opposite himself as the de-aged and wild-eyed Nicky Cage, his boundlessly energetic guest spot proved to be the perfect point of reference.
