Nicolas Cage’s favourite Nicolas Cage performances: “What I aspire to continue towards”
Nicolas Cage has produced such a mind-bogglingly huge body of work over the years that it sounds almost impossible for him to pick a favourite. In truth, it is a task that has been beyond the eccentric star anytime he’s been asked to place one role at the top of the pile. As he once said, all of the parts he has played are his children, even the ones that didn’t pan out so great. So, when Cage is asked to name his favourite Nicolas Cage performances, he always hedges his bets a little and mentions a handful of candidates – all of which we’ll run through in this article.
The first personal Cage favourite that tends to be brought up is unsurprising. Why? Well, because it’s the one that won him his sole Academy Award for ‘Best Actor.’ During a 2022 Reddit AMA session, a fan told Cage that they think his portrayal of alcoholic author Ben Sanderson in Leaving Las Vegas is his best performance, and Cage replied that the harrowing portrayal is certainly up there. He called it one of his three favourites and revealed, “I have not seen Leaving Las Vegas recently. However, that movie and Elizabeth Shue’s work in that movie are what I aspire to continue towards.” He also once praised director Mike Figgis, telling TIME they “found something pretty emotionally naked in Leaving Las Vegas.”
Another one of Cage’s front runners for the top spot in his heart is one of his most memed performances: narcissistic yuppie Peter Loew in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss. As a literary agent who may or may not be transforming into a vampire, Loew was one of Cage’s first times fully embracing the more absurd, heightened instincts in his acting arsenal. He told TIME the movie was “almost like an independent laboratory to start realizing some of my more expressionistic dreams with film performance.” Fascinatingly, he then revealed that he expanded upon what he learned in Vampire’s Kiss in one of his more mainstream efforts nine years later: the John Woo action classic Face/Off. He claimed, “If you look at those two movies back-to-back, you can see where I stole from my performance in Vampire’s Kiss.”
However, there are two movies that Cage considers to be the best of his career, both in terms of his performance and overall movie quality. He told Reddit, “Pig is my favourite performance of mine, and I think that movie, along with Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead, are arguably my two best movies as a whole.”
Since its release in 2021, Cage has been nothing but glowing about Michael Sarnoski’s Pig. To Cage, the small, independent drama about a reclusive chef’s quest to reclaim his beloved truffle pig is the closest he’s ever gotten to making a folk song in the form of a film. He told The New Yorker, “It’s a very quiet, gentle movie, which is the opposite of…people thinking I’m crazy,” and added, “I’d never done anything like that before, where I felt like I got close to putting a meditation on camera, or a haiku.”
As for Bringing Out The Dead, Martin Scorsese’s harrowing 1999 drama about severely depressed New York City paramedic Frank Pierce, Cage has always felt it didn’t get a fair shake. In 2024, he told Deadline, “I think it was misinterpreted. The movie was marketed in such a way — probably because I had been making adventure films — that people thought it was going to be an ambulance action/adventure movie. Well, that’s not what it was. It was a very painful character analysis of a burned-out paramedic.”
Despite the film struggling to find an audience upon release, Cage is adamant that it is the kind of picture that will stand the test of time. He declared, “The movie is worth another look” and praised Scorsese for taking a chance with the film and experimenting with an abstract style that neither of them was overly familiar with at the time. Ultimately, Cage insisted, “I really believe that that is one of my best movies.”
