When asked to recommend an obscure performance, Nicolas Cage gave the most Nicolas Cage-esque answer imaginable.
Nicolas Cage’s filmography is an embarrassment of riches for cinephiles willing to do a little digging. Once you get through the indisputable classics like “Face/Off” and “Raising Arizona,” you’ll find a treasure trove of weird indie films that see him applying the full force of his acting talents to some truly bonkers premises. Cage’s commitment to championing new work is as admirable as his willingness to give 100 percent in even his worst films.
In a new Reddit AMA to promote his upcoming role as Dracula in “Renfield,” Cage was asked to recommend one of his performances that audiences may not have seen. He responded by pulling out a deep cut known only to his most hardcore fans: his brief cameo in the 1989 film “Never on a Tuesday.”
Cage explained that he agreed to appear in the film for free, on the condition that he was given complete creative control over his character. Unsurprisingly, he turned the appearance into a massive dose of pure, uncut Cage-iness.
“There was a little cameo that I did that lasted all of about one minute in a movie called ‘Never on Tuesday,'” Cage said. “I don’t recommend the entire film. But it was a performance I did, I didn’t get paid but the agreement was with the director and whoever was financing the picture that if I do it, they would let me do whatever I wanted. So it was a complete avant-garde experiment, and of course I played a character who had a prosthetic nose which was very long and pointed. And I had this whole concept of this guy who had a very long nose and was having trouble meeting girls so his father bought him a Ferrari Testarossa to help him with that.”
Cage continued: “So I showed up on set with a prosthetic nose and a very high voice driving a Ferrari Testarossa and of course it was very frustrating for all the other actors. They like it now, apparently, but at the time it was like you can’t really fire me because that was the agreement. You said I could do whatever I wanted and he did and so that’s my favorite lesser known performance.”
When asked a follow-up question about whether or not he supplied his own Ferrari, Cage was blunt.
“No, it was somebody’s Ferrari,” he said. “And they took it away from me because I was driving it too fast.”
