The ‘Pulp Fiction’ star who regretted bullying Nicolas Cage: “Particularly merciless”
When Nicolas Cage booked his first role in a major motion picture, he was an unknown 17-year-old Beverly Hills High student. He found himself on the set of a teen comedy that would become a defining film of the 1980s, although his part in it was nothing to write home about. In fact, he appears on-screen in the finished film for all of 20 to 30 seconds, and he wasn’t even credited as ‘Nicolas Cage’. However, thanks to the relentless teasing of his castmates – and one future Pulp Fiction star in particular – he would ensure he was never credited by his real surname again.
In 1981, a book chronicled the year the 22-year-old journalist Cameron Crowe spent undercover in Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. He posed as a student and attended classes while observing and forging relationships with the horny, often aimless teens who believed he was nothing more than their peer. While this undoubtedly sounds more than a little sketchy to modern ears – and also kind of like the plot to 21 Jump Street – Crowe’s motives were innocent enough. He simply wanted to research his book, which he called Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
When the book was turned into a movie by Amy Heckerling, Crowe adapted his book into a screenplay, and an enduring Hollywood career was born. The movie was a phenomenon, as nothing this honest and frank about teen sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll had ever been produced. It made stars of its cast, which included Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, and Phoebe Cates, and gave birth to a teen sex comedy boom.
Cage, who played an unnamed fast food worker barely seen on-screen, was stuck in the film’s background, though. He had auditioned for Reinhold’s character Brad – a much, much bigger role – and was convinced he was going to get it. Casting director Don Phillips confirmed as much to writer Zach Schonfeld when he said, “A lot of people read for that part. But Nic was head and shoulders above all the Brads.”
Phillips was impressed by Cage, who was still going by his family name ‘Coppola’ at that time. In truth, being the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola was likely the only reason a 17-year-old with no screen credits was even brought in for an audition. Phillips and Heckerling both insist they wanted to cast Cage in the role, but Heckerling cryptically claimed she was told she “couldn’t use Nic.” In desperation, she called her pal Reinhold, who lived in her building and was dating her assistant.
A crestfallen Cage was instead given the consolation role of “unnamed burger guy,” but he still tried to make the most of it. Heckerling smiled, “He was wonderful. He did want to do a bunch of improvs and some of them were a little kooky. He’d say something, and the crew would look at each other like, ‘What?'”
Unfortunately for the young superstar-in-waiting, though, his castmates weren’t always quite so enamoured with him. In fact, Eric Stoltz, who was also making his big screen debut, admitted the cast quickly fell into cliques that resembled a real high school social ecosystem. “The lead actors were working most of the time,” Stoltz told Schonfeld in How Coppola Became Cage. “But us smaller roles, we spent a lot of our days sitting around the honeywagons. And while we were hanging out and waiting, we would take the piss out of each other and goof around.”
In this case, “goofing around” meant teasing the ‘nepo baby’ Cage for his family lineage, something that cut him to the bone because he was so desperate to make it in Hollywood under his own steam. Cage named Stoltz a few times over the years as the ringleader of the teasing, which Schonfeld described as “particularly merciless” and not always as good-natured as the future Mask and Pulp Fiction star might have wanted to believe.
“I was pretty much the nerd to everybody,” Cage once lamented to Entertainment Weekly. “I was the brunt of jokes because my name was still Coppola, so there’d be a congregation outside my trailer quoting lines from Apocalypse Now, like, ‘I love the smell of Nicolas in the morning.'”
For his part, Stoltz claimed that most of the ribbing came when Cage would name-drop his uncle. He mused that this wasn’t necessarily a crime, but it made the rest of the cast feel weird. “So, we would give him guff about it until he stopped,” Stoltz admitted. He told Schonfeld that his memory was of everyone laughing and having a good time, but in hindsight, he now realises, “We were undoubtedly envious of his God-given Hollywood access. And he was probably a bit insecure behind all that bravado.”
Ultimately, Stoltz confessed that he regretted teasing Cage, mostly because it might have crossed the line into bullying. It certainly made enough of an impression that the young star changed his stage name from that moment on, leaving ‘Coppola’ in the dust forever. A regretful Stoltz admitted, “I certainly didn’t have the maturity to understand any of that. So yeah, I did take part in the teasing, and I’m sorry I did. I do hope that didn’t cause him too much pain.”
