“Silent, but maybe deadly”: When Nicolas Cage was stalked by a mime
Weirdness is woven into the very fabric of Nicolas Cage, with the actor just as well-known for his eccentricities away from the camera as he is for his inimitable performances in front of it.
Whether he’s eating live cockroaches, having hot yoghurt poured over his toes to get him ready for a sex scene, painting his face like a voodoo practitioner for a character that was rendered through CGI, or beating animatronics possessed by the spirit of a satanic cult to a pulp, there’s nobody quite like him.
Such is Cage’s penchant for the off-kilter that if 100 people were asked which actor was more likely than any other to be stalked by a mime artist, then there’s a distinctly high possibility at least 99 of them would give the same answer, and it would be him.
Not every urban legend surrounding the Academy Award winner’s personal life has been true, but his haunting experience of being ominously followed by a wordless performative artist most definitely is, with Cage regaling the chilling tale to Parade.
“I guess it would fall into the stalker category more or less,” he explained. “I was being stalked by a mime. Silent, but maybe deadly.” He was working with no less of a filmmaking heavyweight than Martin Scorsese at the time, but somehow, the intruder kept turning up to send shivers down the actor’s spine.
“Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of Bringing Out the Dead and start doing strange things,” he continued. “I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action, and I haven’t seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling.”
Scorsese’s 1999 psychological drama follows Cage’s beaten-down paramedic, Frank Pierce, who struggles to cope with the internal and external pressures of his job. Over the course of several nights and various co-workers, he slowly begins losing his grip on sanity and seeks to be terminated from his position of employment.
It’s one of the director’s more underrated features, with Cage doing an incredible job of slowly descending into madness while struggling with the rigours of such an intense profession. It was far from a success at the box office, though, even if Bringing Out the Dead‘s leading man now regards it as one of his finest works, going so far as to say “that might be the best movie I ever made”.
Knowing that Cage was constantly looking over his shoulder to see if he was still being stalked by a mime that brazenly laughed in the face of the film’s security to get into the proximity of its chosen target, it’s even more impressive he managed to leave his outlandishly specific off-screen baggage at the door to deliver such a strong turn.
