The unexpected performance Nicolas Cage based on his mother: “I could hear her voice”
He might have tried to hide it by changing his name, but Nicolas Cage is a member of one of the greatest dynasties in cinema history.
Born Nicolas Kim Coppola, the renegade actor is the son of August Coppola, brother to Talia Shire and Francis Ford Coppola. Cage’s family are responsible for some of the most influential films ever made, and that’s still true even if you exclude the ones he’s been in himself.
In 2024, the master of ‘Nouveau Shamanic’ teamed up with another second-generation star to deliver one of the year’s most talked-about films. Cage played the title character in Longlegs, a horror-thriller from director Osgood Perkins. As the son of Anthony Perkins, who delivered one of the all-time horror performances as Norman Bates in Psycho, there was a lot riding on young Osgood’s shoulders. Luckily, he was able to pull it off, and Longlegs was a massive success.
Considering two of its most significant contributors came from such esteemed families, it’s no wonder a little bit of them crept into the finished product. Speaking with Extra TV, Cage revealed that, when Perkins first sent him the script for Longlegs, he told him that it was actually a movie about his mother.
“I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting, Oz, because when I was reading this character it became about my mom,’” Cage replied. “I heard her voice. She wasn’t satanic, but she went through a lot, and I heard her voice and the way she would move, and suddenly I thought, you know, I could put all that into this character. That was an inspiration… If I’m any good in the movie, I owe it to my mom.”
Cage’s mother was Joy Vogelsang, a German-American dancer and choreographer. The two were clearly very close; he once claimed to remember what it was like to be in her womb, but the star has spoken publicly about his mum’s battles with mental health issues over the years. Joy spent a lot of her son’s childhood in institutions, battling schizophrenia and even receiving electroshock therapy for the condition.
When crafting Dale Kobble, the Satanic, androgynous serial killer at the heart of Longlegs, Cage took inspiration from his mother’s pain. In the same way he believed Joy’s actions were driven by the voices in her head, he tried to ground Dale in that reality. It was really him committing such atrocious acts; he was just possessed by a force far greater than himself.
Perkins, who also directed the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, had a mother with an equally turbulent personal life. Berinthia ‘Berry’ Berenson was married to Anthony Perkins from 1973 until his death in 1992, despite the fact that he was gay. Berenson tried to shield her young children from their father’s double life in an attempt to protect them socially, but this still had an adverse effect on them during their formative years. She died in 2001, when the plane she was travelling on was hijacked as part of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Families are an incredibly difficult subject, but one of the great things about art is how it allows people to express complicated topics in a variety of ways. Cage and Perkins took their feelings about their respective mothers and turned them into a monumentally successful film, which is definitely one of the better outcomes of processing such emotions.
