Nicolas Cage Reveals His Favorite Role And It’s One You’ve Never Even Heard Of
Nicolas Cage says his favorite lesser-known role is in Never on Tuesday, because he was contractually allowed to do whatever he wanted.
One of the reasons we love Nicolas Cage so much is that he gives just as much devotion to his smallest roles as he does to his largest ones. For example, he’s too cool these days to join Marvel, but his non-MCU Ghost Rider performances were delightfully insane. And in a recent Reddit AMA designed to get audiences hyped for Renfield, Cage revealed that his favorite role was popping up briefly in Never on Tuesday, a film most people have never heard of.
In typical Nicolas Cage fashion, he revealed that the reason he loved the movie so much had nothing to do with its overall quality (in fact, he bluntly told Reddit that he couldn’t recommend watching “the entire film”). Instead, he fondly remembers the movie because he negotiated a contract in which he would make a brief cameo for free, but only on one condition. And that condition was that in exchange for not receiving a paycheck, those making the film would let Cage do “whatever I wanted” with the role.
If you’re a Nicolas Cage fan, it won’t shock you to learn that he got really weird with this opportunity in the biggest possible ways. For example, he called the whole thing his “avant-garde experiment” and gave his character a very long, prosthetic nose. When we say Cage gave the character this nose, that’s quite literal: nobody in makeup applied the nose worthy of Steve Martin in Roxanne, Cage just showed up to set wearing it.
That wasn’t all that Nicolas Cage unexpectedly brought to the set, though. The star decided that his character would be one who had always had “trouble meeting girls,” so his father decided to give him a Ferrari Testarossa to compensate. This was another thing that Cage simply brought to the set, along with an inexplicably high voice when delivering his lines.
These days, Nicolas Cage is a major movie star, and many filmmakers and fellow actors are willing to put up with his quirks and eccentricities. Back in 1989, though, nobody knew what to make of Cage’s bizarre choices, and he admitted that the whole thing “was very frustrating for all the other actors.” He claims they now enjoy what he brought to the movie, but at the time, nobody could believe he struck a deal where he could do whatever he wanted with this role without getting fired.
In true Nicolas Cage fashion, even this wild story has a fun follow-up. Somebody on Reddit asked the obvious question about the actor’s story: did he just flex on everybody by bringing his own Ferrari Testarossa to the set? Cage responded that the car belonged to someone else and that the owner apparently loved Cage’s driving about as much as the other actors loved his performance at the time, and the owner was forced to take the car back from Cage “because I was driving it too fast” (maybe it’s not too late to get this man into a Fast and Furious movie).
In a very real way, these insane Nicolas Cage anecdotes have us very hyped up to go see Renfield when it premieres on April 14. Cage’s movies tend to have the same defining quality as the actor himself: they aren’t always good, but they are certainly never boring (something we can’t say about blockbusters like Shazam 2, which is why Zachary Levi is on the verge of tears begging people to go see his film). So we can’t wait to see what Nicolas Cage can do as the world’s most famous vampire, and this story has us crossing our fingers that he ends up recklessly driving a Ferrari before the credits roll.
