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NIC OF TIME
I took mushrooms with my cat and married Elvis’ daughter – but going on Wogan was my maddest moment, says Nicolas Cage
IT was one of the oddest entrances on British TV — Nicolas Cage performing a somersault and high kicks in a leather jacket then flinging cash at Terry Wogan’s audience.
In the 30-plus years since, the Oscar-winning actor has continued to bewilder fans and friends with his odd behaviour.
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Whether it was taking his Elvis Presley obsession so far that he married The King’s daughter Lisa Marie, collecting dinosaur bones or sharing magic mushrooms with his cat, Cage likes living life on the edge.
And at 58 it seems he may have wrong-footed everyone again by announcing his dislike for the “obnoxious” Cage of the Wogan era — as it hasn’t stopped him revisiting that over-the-top persona for a new movie in which he plays himself.
In quirky action film The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, a gangster pays Cage to attend his party.
The normally self-confident star of movies such as Face/Off, Con Air, Wild At Heart and Kick-Ass says he was “terrified” of appearing as himself in a movie.
So rather than portraying the milder, modern-day Cage, he opted for the wilder old version. He says: “I looked at an old interview I did on the Wogan show where I was front handspringing.
“I was promoting Wild At Heart, doing karate kicks, throwing money out at the audience, and I thought, ‘That guy is a really obnoxious, arrogant, irreverent, mad man — and I think he needs to be in this movie’.”
Anyone who saw Nic’s 1990 interview on Sir Terry’s BBC1 talk show will not easily have forgotten it.
The long-haired actor took off his T-shirt, handed it to Terry and finished their chat bare-chested.
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Juvenile delinquents
He told the late TV legend: “I had this need to do crazy things and maybe if I hadn’t become an actor I liked the idea of robbing banks.”
And if that seemed an unlikely career path for the nephew of the great American film-maker Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas — the son of a literature professor — did claim to have attended a correctional school for juvenile delinquents, having got into trouble in regular classes.
But having decided against academia or bank robbing, he followed The Godfather director Francis into Hollywood at the age of 16.
Two years later he appeared alongside Sean Penn in racy comedy drama Fast Times At Ridgemont High under his real name Nicolas Coppola.
But because the cast and crew kept quoting The Godfather at him, he soon changed his surname to Cage — then quickly earned a reputation for being unorthodox, both on and off screen.
He proposed to actress Patricia Arquette on the day he met her in 1987, although it took them another eight years to get together, and he once worked up the rage he needed to play a gangster by smashing up a remote-controlled car.
The Coen Brothers cult hit Raising Arizona in 1987 and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, in which his character Sailor would backflip out of a car, cemented his notoriety.
But it was a string of 1990s hits, starting with a best actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996, and jailbreak action movie The Rock the same year that made him a household name.
In his new film Nicolas decided to give the audience a dose of that testosterone character of old, despite insisting he doesn’t like who he was back then.
He says: “They were talking a little bit about Cameron Poe from Con Air and I was like, ‘That’s cool, but that’s not Nic, that’s Con Air, that’s Cameron Poe’.
“That was Nic in 1990 and I’m so glad I’m nothing like that person any more. But I was happy to bring him back.”
I was promoting Wild At Heart, doing karate kicks, throwing money out at the audience, and I thought, ‘That guy is a really obnoxious, arrogant, irreverent, mad man — and I think he needs to be in this movie'
The film captures what the actor calls his “neurotic” side that the film-makers wanted.
He told the movie’s writer and director Tom Gormican: “Actually, I have really quiet moments at home, reading with my cat. Don’t you want to put in anything like that?”
Thankfully, Tom declined.
And in fact it seems there is not much that’s quiet about the actor’s life.
At the premiere of The Unbearable Weight in New York this week, Nicolas walked the red carpet with his pregnant fifth wife Riko Shibata, who is 31 years his junior.
The father of two sons, Weston, 31, and Kal-El, 16, Nic said he was ready to be a dad again because: “I miss watching them discover sunlight through a leaf on a tree or having a lobster on a dinner table for the first time — the shock and awe, like, ‘What is that?’ ”
The impulsive romantic has clearly not given up on love, despite so many painful break-ups he married Riko last year.
His first marriage, to Patricia, lasted six years until 2001, and soon after their divorce came through he fell for Lisa Marie Presley.
That ended in 2004 after just two years and two months later he got hitched to Korean waitress Alice Kim.
She produced his second son, Kal-El, who was named after Nic’s beloved Superman — it is the superhero’s birth name — and the marriage was Nic’s longest so far at 12 years.
His fourth wife, make-up artist Erika Koike, stayed with him for just four days.
In The Unbearable Weight, it seems the person Nic loves most is himself. At one point, screens showing an old “Nic” and current Nicolas are put together so they can kiss.
He says: “Well, Bugs Bunny was kissing everybody in Looney Tunes and I thought, ‘Well, I should have Nicky kiss Nic in this’, and that wasn’t in the script. So that was fun.
I miss watching them discover sunlight through a leaf on a tree or having a lobster on a dinner table for the first time — the shock and awe, like, ‘What is that?’
“It was so symbolic of what was kind of happening. It’s like, ‘I’m actually making a movie about two versions of myself, what am I doing?’ Making out with yourself in the weirdest way.”
The movie also takes playful aim at Cage’s financial issues and a recent run of somewhat forgettable films.
The Unbearable Weight portrays him as an actor so desperate for cash that he agrees to attend a party for his wealthy fans.
Private island
His agent tells him he has not got the part in a Shakespeare drama that he wanted, and there is a joke about 20-plus films going straight to streaming.
At one point the real Nic had a reported fortune of £120million, but he then came close to bankruptcy due to extravagant spending.
There were mock castles in the US, a real one in Germany and one near Bath, in Somerset, plus a private island in the Bahamas.
Restoring and running them, combined with a property crash, left him heavily out of pocket.
Today, having made 18 movies in the past four years, Nic is no longer short of cash and was even able to turn down The Unbearable Weight at first, even though it was written specifically for him.
He says: “It’s interesting, they were doing all this without my knowledge whatsoever.
“And when I first heard about it, I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that’.
“Then I said, ‘No, I’m not interested in playing myself in a movie, get somebody else’.”
But the director managed to persuade him it was not meant to be mocking him. He adds: “It was a high wire, it was terrifying.
“No muscle in my body told me to play any version of myself in a movie and because it scared the crap out of me, I knew I had to do it.”
Plus he got to work with actor Pedro Pascal, from Star Wars spin-off TV series The Mandalorian, who shared his interest in obscure horror movies.
Some of their conversations even made it into the film.
Cage says: “A lot of what you see in the movie was actually happening when we weren’t on set or acting. It was actually the genuine conversation.
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“It was just life imitating art or art imitating life. It was bizarre but that’s what it was.”
And maybe that is just how we like our Nicolas Cage.
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