When Nicolas Cage was mistaken for Jerry Seinfeld: “Holy cow, it’s really you!”
Celebrity dopplegängers are a well-known phenomenon: Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Connelly and Demi Moore, and Timothée Chalamet and Natalia Dyer. The Three Chrises of Marvel. A flawless genetic code can only produce so many combinations of features. But every once in a while, a story will surface about celebrities getting mistaken for each other, which is truly unexpected.
Such was the case in 1996 when Nicolas Cage went to do some research at a local prison. The film was Con Air, and the actor was accompanied by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Simon West and writer Scott Rosenberg. The classic flick stars Cage as a former Army Ranger who has just finished serving a prison sentence for murder when the convicts on his prison transport plane stage a revolt. It’s a classic, off-the-rails thriller that presses all the right buttons, so the research must have paid off.
In a 20th anniversary retrospective of the film with Empire, Rosenberg remembered the trip to the maximum security prison and the way the inmates responded to having an Oscar winner in their midst. “Gradually, they started to recognise Nic,” he said. “And bigger and bigger groups started to gather around asking questions.” One person asked if Cage would make a film with him, but the most memorable one, Rosenberg recalled, didn’t have a question at all. According to the writer, the man exclaimed, “‘Holy cow, it’s really you!’ Nic said, ‘Yeah, it’s me.’ And the guy said, ‘Yeah! It’s you! Jerry Seinfeld!’”
It’s hard to see much crossover between comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Hollywood’s most avant-garde actor, Nicolas Cage. They both have dark hair and were born within ten years of each other, but other than that, they’re miles apart. If anyone could be mistaken for Cage, it’s John Cusack, who, incidentally, plays a US marshal in Con Air. But Seinfeld? Absolutely not.
The comedian got his start doing stand-up and making the rounds of late-night talk shows before launching his eponymous sitcom with fellow curmudgeon Larry David. Meanwhile, Cage knocked around in a few coming-of-age dramas before turning to blockbusters, Oscar-winners, and increasingly unhinged indies, establishing himself as a cult icon along the way.
It is tempting, however, to consider the implications of this unlikely association. What would Nicolas Cage have made of Seinfeld the TV show? Surely a man who can make even the most pedestrian of scenes a minefield of curveballs would transform a show that is famously about nothing into a piece of experimental theatre that somehow manages to be about everything. Nicolas Cage isn’t technically a comedian, but surely watching him lose his shit at a restaurant maître d would be funnier than anything Seinfeld could have done. And what would Jerry Seinfeld have made of that mesmerisingly atrocious 2006 remake of The Wicker Man? Is it possible that he has an acting range yet to be explored?
All of these are thought-provoking questions, but the inevitable conclusion is that there is just no one like Nicolas Cage. Even Tilda Swinton has a whiff of prestige about her that Cage, in all his glory, could never be accused of. He is simply a one-off, and we love him for it.
