Cage is all the rage – but his recent projects are sell­ing him short

In an inter­view with Stephen Col­bert to pro­mote Ren­field, Nico­las Cage list­ed his top five Nic Cage films: Pig, Mandy, Bring­ing Out the Dead, Bad Lieu­tenant, and Joe. No Face/​Off, or Con Air, or Rais­ing Ari­zona, or any of the tra­di­tion­al exam­ples of the zany, wacko per­for­mances has been entrenched in meme his­to­ry – and def­i­nite­ly not Ren­field. The roles he picks up show­case best the gen­uine and robust emo­tion­al sin­cer­i­ty he laces through all his roles, with even his viral, mocked high­lights being capa­ble of legit­i­mate gravitas.

After his Oscar nom­i­na­tion for his dual turn in Adap­ta­tion, the 2000s saw a slip in qual­i­ty con­trol for Cage, and by the 2010s the fre­quen­cy of his direct-to-video out­put had con­sumed his career. There were the odd blips of stripped-back and artis­tic projects, but mod­ern Cage was known more for his trou­bles with the IRS and ​‘Cage Rage’ on-screen freak­outs than the strengths of his talent.

But then came Mandy, and its LSD-fuelled mis­sion of raw vengeance put Cage back on the map, fol­lowed up swift­ly with the gen­tly heart­break­ing Pig to prove that swine heals all wounds. It was clear Cage’s return to buzzy, bril­liant cin­e­ma was no fluke but a sin­cere renais­sance. The awards buzz around Pig prompt­ed the usu­al ​“redemp­tion arc” ral­ly­ing cries, even though Cage him­self shares no shame about star­ring in DTV guff. Still, his sub­se­quent return to main­stream fare is wel­come – he’s had back-to-back SXSW pre­mieres of stu­dio come­dies that, on the sur­face, tap into his much enjoyed Cage eccentricities.

Play­ing a pas­tiched ver­sion of him­self in Tom Gormican’s The Unbear­able Weight of Mas­sive Tal­ent, fol­lowed by a height­ened, com­ic ver­sion of Drac­u­la seemed like a sure hit. But it came as a crush­ing dis­ap­point­ment that, despite the pas­sion both films had for Nic Cage’s brand of act­ing, they were less inter­est­ed in him chan­nelling any­thing inno­v­a­tive or nuanced, with their appre­ci­a­tion of Cage not dis­sim­i­lar to the type you’d find in a YouTube com­pi­la­tion of all his loud­est and weird­est moments, devoid of any emo­tion­al con­text or complexity.

To clar­i­fy, Cage is ter­rif­ic in Mas­sive Tal­ent and Ren­field. As the prince of dark­ness, his strange into­na­tion or Ger­man expres­sion­ist phys­i­cal­i­ty all feels care­ful­ly thought through, but there’s a hard ceil­ing to how good Cage can be when it’s all in ser­vice of a bloat­ed, half-baked action-com­e­dy (one strange­ly lack­ing in hor­ror) that had twice the bud­get of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s much-lam­bast­ed depic­tion of the Tran­syl­van­ian count.

The fact that cast­ing Nic Cage as Drac­u­la sounds like a no-brain­er is ulti­mate­ly its great­est flaw – it’s such a flashy, tan­ta­lis­ing idea that the film­mak­ers behind Ren­field clear­ly didn’t antic­i­pate need­ing a com­plex use for the char­ac­ter. Yes, Cage is rev­er­ent to the cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry of vam­pires, but his per­for­mance still feels like it belongs to a more dar­ing, inven­tive film. It’s not that he mis­un­der­stood the assign­ment, rather that Cage gave a more inter­est­ing response than the assign­ment nec­es­sar­i­ly deserved.

Every year cin­e­ma cross­es new fron­tiers of what we thought pos­si­ble in the medi­um, but we’re still stuck in a regres­sive idea of what ​“good” per­for­mances look like. How can we say that every type and shade of emo­tion can be accessed by the real­is­tic, com­mit­ted but non-exper­i­men­tal per­for­mances that win awards? When we see Cage’s ago­niz­ing wails at the hands of cultists in The Wick­er Man or his sub­mis­sion to vam­pirism in Vampire’s Kiss, or even the bug-eyed mania of blurred iden­ti­ties in Face/​Off, do we real­ly not recog­nise that height­ened, unhinged per­for­mances are accessed with pre­cise, well-honed act­ing chops, and not just by ​“going apeshit”?

Nei­ther Mas­sive Tal­ent nor Ren­field could have hap­pened if Cage hadn’t been pre­vi­ous­ly co-opt­ed into meme­dom, with iron­ic love for the uncon­ven­tion­al flat­ten­ing all the intri­ca­cies that he can offer. Until we break out of the habit of see­ing the sort of bizarre and ampli­fied per­for­mances that Cage deals in as some­thing to laugh at, actors are just going to be dis­ser­viced by indus­tries that have already mis­treat­ed them.

The monkey’s paw of Cage return­ing to the main­stream isn’t restrict­ed to Hol­ly­wood reject­ing the performer’s nuances, but a pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of stul­ti­fy­ing and unimag­i­na­tive come­dies that wants to tap into inter­net-friend­ly out­landish­ness glee. After Ren­field and Cocaine Bear already in 2023, it’s clear you can’t just pin every­thing on a hare­brained con­cept and a self-aware tone; they can’t even be saved by drop­ping more inter­est­ing and deserv­ing actors into the mid­dle of them. If this is what Cage will be rel­e­gat­ed to now he’s pop­u­lar again, he might be bet­ter served by his 2010 streak – DTV drek doesn’t insult its audi­ence, and Joe and Mandy showed a small­er scale might be the best way for him to explore some­thing profound.

The queasy con­no­ta­tions of the ​“actor redemp­tion arc” are clear (why is it the mis­treat­ed per­former who has to redeem them­selves with good projects rather than the para­me­ters of the indus­try that have to change?), but queasi­er still are the options avail­able to peo­ple once Hol­ly­wood re-recog­nis­es their worth. Ask­ing some­one to pan­tomime a mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what makes them com­pelling just speaks to the lim­it­ed­ness of what vari­ety the main­stream will even per­mit. Recall Bren­dan Fras­er and Ke Huy Quan’s recent Oscar wins: online clam­our for them to return to fran­chis­es audi­ences watched as chil­dren reveals a stag­ger­ing incu­ri­ous­ness about what actors can offer us.

If we weren’t due Cage projects from film­mak­ers like Oz Perkins and Kristof­fer Bor­gli, the state of the shaman­ic thespian’s career would set off alarms. Still, his return to stu­dio film­mak­ing car­ries a warn­ing: Nic Cage should not be back on any­one else’s terms but Nic Cage’s.