Nicolas Cage

The weight of an erased last name

Nicolas Kim Coppola decided he didn't want to be a Coppola so no one could accuse him of nepotism. He changed his last name to Cage, in honor of the comic book character Luke Cage and the composer John Cage. That decision defined his entry into the film industry in the 1980s.

Nobody expected a Coppola to want to be the odd one out.

In 1983 he appeared in Rumble Fish under his uncle's direction, but his true identity began to take shape in comedies like Valley Girl. He wasn't chasing easy applause. He wanted to experiment with a physicality that many critics of the time called excessive or outright ridiculous.

And audiences responded with a mix of bewilderment and fascination. In 1987 he shot Raising Arizona with the Coen brothers and Moonstruck alongside Cher. These were two opposite registers that confirmed his ability to inhabit characters on the edge of sanity without losing the box office's favor.

The Oscar and the adrenaline explosion

In 1995 he starred in Leaving Las Vegas, a drama in which he played an alcoholic screenwriter determined to drink himself to death in the city of sin. His performance was so raw that the Academy had no choice but to give him the Oscar for Best Actor. But what came next was a move nobody saw coming in the Hollywood offices.

Cage decided he wanted to be an action star. Between 1996 and 1997 he went on a run with The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. That trilogy of explosions and inflated budgets earned him fifteen million dollars per film and established a template for the vulnerable yet unhinged action hero.

The method worked.

Because Cage doesn't act (he inhabits a parallel reality). He himself named his style Nouveau Shamanic, a technique inspired by the rituals of ancient shamans that seeks to connect with the spiritual through physical excess. For years this way of working kept him at the top, but it also pushed him toward catastrophic financial decisions.

The desert trek and the return

By 2009, the actor's financial troubles had made headlines around the world. Bad real estate investments and poor management of his assets forced him to take practically any role offered to him. He therefore entered a phase of rushed shoots, with direct-to-video releases that damaged his reputation with the most conservative critics.

His debt to the U.S. tax authorities amounted to fourteen million dollars.

But the actor never stopped working with the same intensity, whether in a big-budget blockbuster or a B-movie shot in Eastern Europe. In 2018, the film Mandy changed how people saw his career. Director Panos Cosmatos gave him the freedom to scream, cry and wield a chainsaw in a visual festival that earned him back the respect of genre festivals.

In 2021, the film Pig showed that the restrained, quiet Cage was still alive. He played a truffle hunter who lives in the forest and searches for his stolen pig, a premise that could have been a parody but turned out to be a profound drama about grief. In 2023 he returned to dark comedy with Dream Scenario, playing a college professor who appears in people's dreams around the world.

In 2024 Longlegs grossed one hundred million dollars worldwide on a production budget of less than ten million.