“All this is not real, do you understand?
People don't care about you, they don't know you, because you haven't taught them anything.
You will wake up every morning feeling less than you.
You live for them and they don't even notice you.
You don't even look at yourself.
They don't give us a lot of things that really matter to us."
The phrase is whispered in
Pig
by Nicolas Cage's character, a former chef turned black truffle collector, to a new star chef, who lives off smoke and trompe l'oeil.
But at the same time it is a declaration of principles by Cage himself (Long Beach, 58 years old): be yourself, do not differentiate life from art, and it will be then when people, the cinema public in his case, will idolize you above the rest.
And that can be glimpsed both in the aforementioned
Pig,
which will hit Spanish theaters on July 15, as in
The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent,
released last Friday.
Cage open bar.
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'The unbearable weight of a huge talent': Nicolas Cage laughs at himself as the savior of the daughter of the president of Catalonia
But what is special about Cage over the rest of his colleagues?
Why has a performer who is dismissed by many critics as overacting achieved a collection of fans around the world?
Why are his gestures and his shouts mythologized by a legion of irredentists?
“There are no actors today like Cage.
There is no one with that star life or whose personality runs through the movies.
The scripts don't matter.
Like Humphrey Bogart did in classic film noir: viewers went to see one of Bogart and that's it.
Well, with Cage, the same”, recalls Torïo García, one of his great admirers.
Last year, together with cartoonist Paco Alcázar, he published
The 100 First Films of Nicolas Cage
(Caramba Comics), and is the author of the virtual encyclopedia NickCagepedia —because the correct diminutive of the actor is Nick and not Nic, as was thought until he recently clarified it himself—, an immersion in a fascinating filmmaker.
"In these modern times, it seems like an anachronism with its classic star aura," Garcia elaborates.
Back cover of the book 100 movies Nicolas CageCaramba Comics
We are talking about an actor who took to buying castles until he discovered that his administrator had bankrupted him.
That he has been married five times, once with the actress Patricia Arquette and another with the daughter of Elvis Presley (in his films, a song by the king of rock always plays).
That one of his sons was baptized in 2005 as Kal-El Cage in homage to Superman, a character he would have played if Tim Burton's version had gone ahead.
An avid comic book collector who also bought haunted mansions, shrunken pygmy heads, a shark...even a dinosaur skull that he ended up returning to the Mongolian government, which claimed it.
In the end, the most normal thing is that he hid under an artistic alias from the beginning of his career, so that no one would suspect possible cinematographic nepotism:
Nicolas Kim Coppola is the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, and decided to change his last name to Luke Cage, the Marvel superhero.
“The incredible thing is that he does not have any social network, like other celebrities who sell us his life in those media.
We find out what happens to him without filters.
He's authentic for better and for worse, which I guess will drive his PR crazy.
He is a phenomenon like no other,” Garcia points out.
Nicolas Cage, surrounded by fans at the 2018 Sitges festival. Robert Marquardt (Getty Images)
As an actor, this panoply of gestures has been baptized as Shamanic Nouveau.
“His great influences on him are the cinema of the twenties and thirties and German expressionism, especially
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
”, says his fan.
"Of course, it has a very wide range, but when it is contained it does not attract so much attention."
He already said it with the Oscar in hand for
Leaving Las Vegas
in 1996: what he wanted was to "experiment" and "evolve towards the future of acting."
Paco Cabezas, who directed him in 2014 in
Tokarev,
in which Cage embodied an avenging father, brings other ingredients to the Cage method: "He loves Korean cinema, and says that kabuki, traditional Japanese theater, is his acting base."
This Friday
the unbearable weight of a huge talent premiered,
in which he embodies himself as a Cage drowning in debt who is forced to accept a millionaire sum to attend the birthday of an eccentric Majorcan billionaire, a great fan of his work and related to arms and drug trafficking.
Curiously, the project was written by its director, Tom Gormican, behind the interpreter's back, who also had a hard time accepting the challenge.
Why?
Because the internet is full of compilation videos with his most exacerbated performances, because
gifs
of his gestures are multiplying, and because any Internet user can buy cushions, pillows, sweatshirts or underwear with Cage's face on them.
"He doesn't take this irony well," says Garcia.
Nicholas Cage, in 'Pig'.
In
The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent,
Cage talks to himself: he appears as a young man "when he was a star" and today, when he confesses that what he needs "is not fame, but acting" - he already faced the double character in
The Orchid Thief (Adaptation),
his second Oscar nomination.
Against him, a devious drug trafficker —he has kidnapped the daughter of the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia— played by Paco León.
"From the shoot in Croatia I remember a very polite guy, very attentive to technique," explains the Spanish actor, "and very Nicolas Cage 24 hours a day, stuffed into leather jackets despite the heat."
León was struck by the fact that at the first meeting of the entire cast to read the script, the American already knew it by heart.
Could it be that Leon is imitating Cage when the obvious showdown between hero and villain comes around?
"I wouldn't say no to you," he confesses with a laugh.
“Seriously, he liked the idea of me getting into his game.
Normally other actors are scared by his outrageousness.
I'm not a mythomaniac
Wild Heart.
That did make me nervous."
Nicolas Cage at Tim Burton's Superman costume fittings.
And in mid-July
Pig will arrive,
his attempt to reach the Oscars last year, thanks to a more restrained, naturalistic work, giving life to a hermit hunter of truffles, a former prestigious chef, whose sow is stolen, a tracker essential to their livelihood.
“That obsession with a job well done,” says Cabezas, “reflects his own drive.
Beyond the outlandish ideas halfway between genius and madness with which he sometimes appeared on the set, Cage brings a lot to each character”.
Cage's toupee and his own life
Another feature that unites Cage with stars like Charlton Heston, Sean Connery (in the entire Bond saga), John Travolta and Chuck Norris or in Spain Paco Rabal and Tony Leblanc is his use of a toupee.
In his worst financial moments, around 2007-2009, when the US treasury claimed six million dollars (5.7 million euros), "he lived through years of chaos due to the lack of budget," Garcia says with a laugh.
In a sequence of
The Unbearable Weight...
Paco León's character grabs Cage and rips off a mask and a wig.
"They warned me to do it carefully, because underneath was theirs," explains the Sevillian.
“What tension!” He finishes off.
“In
Tokarev”,
recalls Cabezas, "his personal hairdresser accompanied him, and when he left his caravan no one could touch his hair."
Which is the more real Cage, the one who portrays
The Unbearable Weight...
or the one who meditates on his past in
Pig?
“The first”, defends Cabezas, “because Cage is always Cage.
An upright guy who in my case supported me when in
Tokarev
he wanted to get out of the commercial and do something more authorial, against the producers”.
Another thing is his terrible ability to accept any project.
Cabezas replies: “Maybe, but the fact that Nicolas Cage exists in today's cinema and acting... that's a gift”.