Nicolas Cage

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicolas Cage was 15 years old when he told his uncle, the director Francis Ford Coppola, "I'll show you acting." He wanted a screen test. What he got was silence in the car. His uncle had already directed Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman and Robert De Niro, so the demand took nerve. Decades later, films featuring Cage have grossed over 6.4 billion dollars worldwide. He has won an Academy Award, led blockbuster action franchises, and built a devoted cult following. He has also been accused of overacting, lost homes to foreclosure, and gone through long stretches when his films flopped. This documentary asks how a boy from one of Hollywood's best-known families ended up needing a different last name. It asks why directors call his acting inventive while critics call it excessive. And it asks what happens when an actor with a huge salary spends faster than he earns.

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• 2. Coppola Roots

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  Long Beach, California, is where Nicolas Kim Coppola was born on the 7th of January 1964. His father, August Coppola, was a professor of literature. His mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer and choreographer. The family was Catholic. On his father's side, music and film ran through the family tree. His grandfather was the composer Carmine Coppola, and his grandmother was the actress Italia Pennino. His great-grandparents were immigrants from Bernalda, in the Basilicata region of Italy. His uncle is the director Francis Ford Coppola, and his aunt is the actress Talia Shire. His cousins include the directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola, the producer Gian-Carlo Coppola, and the actors Robert and Jason Schwartzman. He is the youngest of three sons. His brothers are Marc "The Cope" Coppola, a New York radio personality, and the director Christopher Coppola.

  Beverly Hills High School, known for the many entertainers among its alumni, is where Cage first pointed himself at acting. He later attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. His first acting outside cinema was a school production of Golden Boy. James Dean was the spark. Cage said he wanted to be Dean after watching him in Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. Of Dean's performance in East of Eden, he said, "It blew my mind."

  On the set of Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, castmates kept quoting his uncle's films at him. That pushed Cage to take a stage name that avoided any appearance of nepotism. He drew the name from two sources, the Marvel Comics superhero Luke Cage and the composer John Cage. He used it for his entire professional life. Yet he only changed it legally in 2025.

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• 3. Misfits and Flops

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  A television pilot called The Best of Times gave Cage his acting debut in 1981, but ABC never picked it up. His film debut came in 1982 with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He played an unnamed co-worker of Judge Reinhold's character, after auditioning for Reinhold's part. In 1983, Valley Girl gave him his first starring role, opposite Deborah Foreman. Cage played a punk who falls in love with the title character, in a plot loosely inspired by Romeo and Juliet. It was a modest box office success and has been branded a cult classic.

  The Outsiders, also in that period, slipped away from him. He auditioned for the part of Dallas Winston, but Matt Dillon won it. Cage still co-starred that year in Rumble Fish, his uncle's adaptation of another novel by S.E. Hinton.

  Birdy, released in 1984, demanded a physical transformation. Directed by Alan Parker, it starred Cage alongside Matthew Modine. Cage lost weight and had two front teeth pulled out to look disfigured. The film massively underperformed at the box office. Reviews were positive, though. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that the two actors "work miracles with what might have been unplayable."

  The Coen brothers cast Cage as a dim-witted ex-con in Raising Arizona in 1987. That same year, Moonstruck paired him with Cher, with Cage as a hot-tempered baker. Critics and audiences both embraced it, and it earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Roger Ebert later wrote that he felt the performance deserved an Oscar.

  Vampire's Kiss in 1989 went the other way. Cage played a man who falls in love with a vampire and starts to believe he is one. It was a major box office flop. Critic Vincent Canby felt the film was "dominated and destroyed by Mr. Cage's chaotic, self-indulgent performance." Over time, that same surreal, over-the-top work has fed a cult following, partly through internet memes.

  David Lynch's Wild at Heart, in 1990, let Cage sing as Elvis Presley, one of his heroes. Laura Dern co-starred. Reviews were mixed, although the film controversially won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Cage and Dern later reunited with Lynch for the avant-garde concert performance Industrial Symphony No. 1. The Elvis thread reached into Cage's private life too. On the 10th of August 2002, he married Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis's daughter, in Kamuela, Hawaii. They filed for divorce 107 days later.

  Fire Birds, a 1990 action film in which Cage played a helicopter pilot, was panned and compared unfavorably to Top Gun. Zandalee, in 1991, went direct-to-video in the United States. In 1992, Honeymoon in Vegas brought Cage his second Golden Globe nomination. Ebert defended him when other critics found his acting excessive. Cage hosted Saturday Night Live to promote the film, his only turn as host. His three 1993 films, Deadfall, Amos & Andrew and Red Rock West, all performed poorly. Deadfall was directed by his brother Christopher. Trapped in Paradise, a much-criticized Christmas comedy, flopped too. According to Jon Lovitz, Cage directed portions of it because the credited director, George Gallo, offered little direction.

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• 4. Prestige Performances

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  Two weeks of binge drinking were part of Cage's preparation for Leaving Las Vegas in 1995. He also studied footage of himself. He played an alcoholic screenwriter who falls in love with a prostitute in Las Vegas. The role won him the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a drama. He also won a Screen Actors Guild award. Earlier that year, his turn as a psychopathic criminal kingpin in Kiss of Death had been seen by many critics as that film's strongest element.

  Charlie Kaufman, a real-life screenwriter, and his fictional twin Donald were both played by Cage in Adaptation in 2002. The double role earned him Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best actor. In 2003, Ridley Scott's black comedy crime film Matchstick Men gave him a con artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder to play.

  The Wrestler might have been a prestige role too. In November 2007, Cage was spotted backstage at a Ring of Honor wrestling show in New York City, researching the lead. He dropped out shortly afterward, feeling he lacked time to prepare. Director Darren Aronofsky preferred Mickey Rourke. Aronofsky said, "Nic was a complete gentleman," and noted that Cage was supportive of his old friend Rourke. Rourke went on to receive an Academy Award nomination.

  Werner Herzog directed Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in 2009. Cage played a corrupt police officer with gambling, drug and alcohol addictions. The film held an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote that Herzog had found a performer whose truth lies deep in the artifice of performance. The film reunited Cage with Eva Mendes, who had been his love interest in Ghost Rider.

  Joe, in 2013, cast Cage as a tormented man who hires a 15-year-old boy, played by Tye Sheridan, and protects him from the boy's abusive father. It premiered at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on the 30th of August 2013. It grossed only 2.36 million dollars against a 4 million dollar budget. Critics nonetheless acclaimed Cage's performance and David Gordon Green's direction.

  Dog Eat Dog, in 2016, was Cage's second film with the director Paul Schrader. It reunited him with Willem Dafoe, his co-star from Wild at Heart, as ex-convicts hired to kidnap a baby. It closed the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it four stars out of five.

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• 5. Action Hero

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  Michael Bay's The Rock, in 1996, put Cage opposite Sean Connery and Ed Harris. Cage played an FBI chemical weapons specialist breaking into Alcatraz federal prison. It was a box office and critical success. Journalist Alexander Larman wrote that it launched Cage into an unexpected vocation as an offbeat action star.

  June 1997 brought two more action hits, Con Air and Face/Off. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer offered Cage the lead in Con Air after being impressed by Leaving Las Vegas and The Rock. Cage accepted despite his disappointment at not being offered the villain. Ebert felt Cage made the wrong choice by playing Cameron Poe as a slow-witted Elvis type, and wished the character had been less of a hayseed. In John Woo's Face/Off, Cage and John Travolta played a terrorist and an FBI agent who swap faces and then must play each other. The BBC wrote that both actors gave their dual roles physical subtleties reflecting the other's character.

  City of Angels, in 1998, was a deliberate return to "more serious fare" after the action run. This romantic fantasy was a loose remake of the German film Wings of Desire. Critics split. One review called him "endlessly resourceful," while another said he resembled "a serial killer more than an angel." His second film that year, Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes, cast him as a corrupt detective and drew mixed reviews that mostly criticized the screenplay.

  Gone in 60 Seconds, in 2000, gave Cage the role of a retired car thief. Along with The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off, it is among the films where most of his financial success has come. National Treasure followed in 2004. It became his second-highest-grossing film to date, with Cage as an eccentric historian hunting treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers of the United States.

  The success was not constant. Lord of War and The Weather Man, both in 2005, found no significant audience despite good reviews. The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man was very poorly reviewed and failed to earn back its 40-million-dollar budget. In early December 2006, Cage announced at the Bahamas International Film Festival that he planned to curtail his acting to pursue other interests.

  Ghost Rider, based on a Marvel Comics character, arrived in 2007 to harsh criticism but did better commercially. It earned more than 45 million dollars on its opening weekend, the top earner. By the weekend ending the 25th of March 2007, it had made over 208 million dollars worldwide. Also that year, Cage played the criminal mastermind Dr. Fu Manchu in Rob Zombie's fake trailer Werewolf Women of the S.S., from the Grindhouse double feature. He returned as the treasure hunter in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. In 2010 he played the sorcerer in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The next year he played a 14th-century knight transporting a woman accused of causing the Black Plague to a monastery in Season of the Witch. In 2011 he also revived the burning-skull biker in a Ghost Rider sequel, a role he would later link to cobras.

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• 6. Acting Style

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  David Lynch described Cage as "the jazz musician of American acting." The line captures a performer who, by his own account, works from impulse. Cage calls his approach Nouveau Shamanic. He says it is about increasing one's imagination without restraint, so that he avoids feeling ingenuous. In his words, "You don't feel like you're acting, you feel like you're being."

  Vampire's Kiss, from 1989, is where Cage says he moved away from method acting toward this approach. The scene in which he recites the alphabet to his psychiatrist came from acting on impulse. Raising Arizona showed the physicality of the style. For Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, he credited cobras among his pets. He said that "They would try to hypnotize you by going side to side," which is something his character does before attacking.

  Sean Penn told The New York Times in 1999 that Cage was "no longer an actor" but "more like a performer." That was after Cage's run of mainstream-marketed thrillers in the late 1990s. Many critics have accused Cage of overacting. Others, including Cage himself, call his intentionally extreme performances "mega-acting." Yet Penn, accepting his own Oscar for Mystic River, named Cage's work in Matchstick Men one of the best performances of 2003.

  Guardian critic Luke Buckmaster has said Cage has the presence of a leading man and the eccentricities of a character actor. He credits the family's well-cultured background for an attraction to grotesque characters. In 2013, Ethan Hawke said Cage was the only actor since Marlon Brando to have done something new with the art. Hawke praised him for moving audiences away from naturalism toward a presentation style he compared to old troubadours. In 2018, the Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare dedicated a comic strip to Cage as an incarnation of the outcasts of 1990s films.

  During the 2010s, a growing number of critics called Cage one of the most underrated actors of his generation. A string of horror films, including Drive Angry, Mom and Dad, Mandy, Color Out of Space, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Willy's Wonderland, Arcadian, Renfield, Dream Scenario and Longlegs, earned him the label scream king. Mom and Dad premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and reached theaters on the 19th of January 2018. Director John Waters placed it fourth on his list of the best movies of 2018.

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• 7. Fortune and Fallout

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  Forbes reported that Cage earned 40 million dollars in 2009, yet he missed its Top 10 list by 2014. In between, a spending spree left him with a mountain of debt. In 2006, he bought a 40-acre island in the Exuma archipelago, about 85 miles southeast of Nassau. That same year he also bought Schloss Neidstein, a medieval castle in Germany's Oberpfalz region, and sold it in 2009 for 2.5 million dollars. In August 2007, he bought Grey Craig, a 24,000-square-foot manor in Middletown, Rhode Island, with 12 bedrooms and 10 full bathrooms. Also in 2007 he bought Midford Castle in Somerset, England.

  Samuel Levin, Cage's business manager, later described the spending in a court filing. He said Cage had ended up with 15 personal residences. Levin said that in 2007 alone, Cage bought three more residences for more than 33 million dollars, along with 22 automobiles, including nine Rolls Royces. The filing added 12 purchases of expensive jewelry and 47 of artwork and exotic items. One item was a Tarbosaurus dinosaur skull. When Cage discovered it was stolen, he returned it to Mongolian authorities. Levin also said he had advised against a Gulfstream jet, a "flotilla of yachts" and a "squadron of Rolls Royces."

  On the 14th of July 2009, the Internal Revenue Service filed documents in New Orleans for a federal tax lien on Cage's Louisiana property. The agency alleged he had failed to pay over 6.2 million dollars in federal income tax for 2007. A second lien covered more than 350,000 dollars in unpaid taxes from 2002 to 2004. On the 16th of October 2009, Cage filed a 20-million-dollar lawsuit against Levin, alleging negligence and fraud. Levin countered that he had warned Cage he was living beyond his means. Cage also faced lawsuits from East West Bank and Red Curb Investments over unpaid loans.

  Houses began to go under the hammer. The LaLaurie House, a French Quarter home in New Orleans that Cage called the Most Haunted House in America, was foreclosed. It sold at auction on the 12th of November 2009, with another New Orleans property, for a combined 5.5 million dollars. His Bel Air home had six loans totaling 18 million dollars. It failed to sell at an April 2010 foreclosure auction despite an opening offer of 10.4 million dollars. Cage had once tried to sell it for 35 million. It finally sold in November 2010 for 10.5 million dollars.

  Comics offered another lever. In 2002, Cage auctioned a collection of 400 vintage comics through Heritage Auctions for over 1.6 million dollars. In 1997 he had bought a copy of Action Comics #1 for 110,000 dollars. It was stolen from him in 2000, and he received an insurance payment. In March 2011, it turned up in a storage locker in the San Fernando Valley, and ComicConnect.com verified it was the same copy. In November 2011, he sold it through Heritage Auctions for a record 2.16 million dollars, to help pay his tax liens and other debts. The previous record had been 1.5 million dollars.

  Giving ran alongside the spending. Cage has been called one of Hollywood's most generous stars. He donated 2 million dollars to Amnesty International to help some of the 300,000 children forced to fight in conflicts worldwide. He gave 1 million dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina. He was appointed a United Nations ambassador for Global Justice in 2009 and again in 2013.

  By May 2017, Cage was reportedly worth around 25 million dollars and "taking film roles left and right" to pay off remaining debts. By 2022, he confirmed those debts were finally paid. He said he intended to be more selective with his roles.

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• 8. Critical Resurgence

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  Mandy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on the 19th of January 2018. Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote that director Panos Cosmatos's style "takes full advantage of Cage's greatness." In October, the film's producer Elijah Wood announced plans to campaign for an Oscar for Cage and for the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who had died that February. The film was disqualified because it had also been released on video on demand on the 14th of September.

  Voice work ran through the same period. Cage voiced Clark Kent and Superman in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies in 2018. He had originally been slated to play Superman in Tim Burton's canceled Superman Lives, in the 1990s. In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, he voiced Spider-Man Noir, a monochromatic 1930s version of Peter Parker. He based that voice on films of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. In 2023's The Flash, he appeared as an alternate Superman in a cameo, shot through volumetric capture and de-aged with CGI.

  Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space, based on an H. P. Lovecraft story, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 7th of September 2019. It was Stanley's first feature since his firing from The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996. Cage received the Creative Coalition's Spotlight Initiative Award there. It reached 81 US theaters on the 24th of January 2020. Sion Sono's Prisoners of the Ghostland premiered at Sundance in 2021. Cage called it possibly "the wildest movie I've ever made."

  Not every project survived. In May 2020, Cage was announced as Joe Exotic in a scripted eight-episode Tiger King series. The project was scrapped in July 2021.

  Pig, in 2021, cast Cage as Rob Feld, a former chef turned reclusive truffle-forager searching for his kidnapped foraging pig. Cage produced and starred. His performance earned critical acclaim and a second Critics' Choice nomination for Best Actor. He then played a fictionalized version of himself in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In Dream Scenario, in 2023, he played a professor who begins appearing in other people's dreams. It brought his fifth Golden Globe nomination.

  Renfield, also in 2023, cast Cage as Dracula opposite Nicholas Hoult. He also became a playable character in the horror video game Dead by Daylight. In July 2024, he starred in Longlegs as the titular serial killer, and he produced the film. That August, he signed on to play the football coach and broadcaster John Madden in Madden. In 2026, he headlines the series Spider-Noir for MGM+ and Amazon Prime Video. It is a live-action version of the same Spider-Man Noir he voiced in 2018, set in an alternate 1930s New York City.

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