Nicolas Cage: Hollywood’s Outrageous Oddball

 Nicolas Cage, born Nicolas Coppola, is one of the most recognizable faces in all of Hollywood. The nephew of legendary director Francis Ford Coppola, Cage has acting credits in over 100 films in nearly every genre imaginable and is one of the most well-known actors in the world for both his great and bad performances. Having both won an Academy Award as well as having received some of Hollywood’s harshest criticism for his performances, Cage is an actor who gives of himself completely to his creative process no matter the role he is playing. Taking inspiration from acting schools of the past, Cage’s creative process is composed of two primary styles that he developed. The first is known as Western Kabuki, which Cage describes as going all out for a role with him trying to push the performance to all extremes possible. The second form he employs in his creative process is that of nouveau shamanic, which he describes as “trying to augment your imagination to get to the performance without feeling like you’re faking it”. In both of these forms of acting, Cage seeks to fully embody the role he is seeking to perform within himself. In doing this to try and achieve the best performance possible, Cage consistently finds himself experimenting in the search to uncover which methods and decisions allow him to best embody a character. In understanding what makes an excellent performance, he views great acting as being “emotionally naked” and that it is through that nakedness that the best performances shine through. For Nicolas Cage, he feels that he cannot have success as a performer in expressing a role fully unless it comes from a place of emotional genuineness. He remarks: “If I can’t inform the dialogue with genuine emotional content I will be a phony on camera, and I don’t want to be that”.

 

In acting, particularly in film, collaboration is a necessity. From working with the other actors to the director and the rest of the crew on a shoot to the words in the script, actors are forced to interact with many different sources to inform the performance they are going to give. As one of Hollywood’s most experimental and multi-faceted actors, Nicolas Cage frequently acknowledges the collaboration that must take place within his creative process. When asked how he responds if a director does not take to his acting experiments, he stated: “As a film actor, my job is to facilitate the director’s vision. If there is something I’m doing that they don’t agree with, I drop it”. In this statement, Cage acknowledges the give and take that collaboration in film making entails and how it can affect the creative product he is presenting to the world. Cage also collaborates frequently with other actors, both those he is acting alongside and those he admires, to create a great performance. When asked about paying homage to actors in the past via his performance choices, Cage describes how incorporating those moments from other actors, some of whom have died, operates as a form of collaboration as he takes elements from their performances that he knows have worked and repurposes them for his own roles. In collaborating in this way, Cage seeks to consistently experiment and work to achieve what he believes to be the best possible performance, even if it results in him becoming a meme for his work on the screen.

In his performance in Raising Arizona, Cage’s embodied form of acting is on full display. Playing an outlandish ex-con who kidnaps the child of another family with his wife, Cage dials up his cartoonish behaviors as a means of attempting to capture the hilarity that comes with his character and the situation that is unfolding on the screen. In the film, Cage allows himself to be free to fully explore the comically crazed nature of the character in an attempt to capture the best comedic portrayal of the character possible. The film also reflects the collaboration between director and actor that Cage acknowledges as existing in his work, discussing how the Coen brothers, the directors of the film, were initially unreceptive to his experiments but came to go along with the work he was presenting for them. No matter if his performances are lauded for their brilliance or critically panned, Nicolas Cage continues to give every ounce of himself to the creative process of acting. Seeking to eventually star in over 150 films and reflect the greatness of the film stars of his youth, Cage finds himself continually pushing to elevate his creative process as a means of presenting the perfect performance on screen. He states: “I want to be on set. I want to be performing. In any other business, hard work is something to behold. Why not in film performance?”.

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/07/magazine/nicolas-cage-interview.html?mtrref=www.google.com&assetType=PAYWALL

https://www.gq.com/story/nicolas-cage-april-cover-profile

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/method-madness-nicolas-cage