Who amongst us doesn't absolutely adore Nicolas Cage?
After a decade or so marred by starring roles in flimsy tent poles and not-so-great blockbusters—please, no one mention the bees—the actor has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence with parts in outré indie flicks: think Mandy, Color Out of Space, and Willy's Wonderland. Now, he's grabbing accolades and acclaim left, right, and center for his starring role in debut director Michael Sarnoski's Pig, a revenge drama about an ex-chef trying to find his beloved stolen swine. In conversation with Variety for their Awards Circuit Podcast, he describes Sarnoski as "Archangel Michael," crediting him as having saved his career.
In his words:
“I knew after a couple of flops that I had been marginalized in the studio system; and I wasn’t going to get invited by them. I always knew that it would take a young filmmaker who would come back or remember some movies I had made and know that I might be right for his script and rediscover me. And that’s why he’s not just Michael, he’s Archangel Michael. This wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t have the open mind to say, ‘Come with me.’”
Cage had a lot of actory words to exchange about the performance process, too, stating that he prefers to be called a "thespian": it "means you're going into your heart, or you're going into your imagination, or your memories or your dreams, and you're bringing something back to communicate with the audience," the 57-year-old says. He continues:
“It was my aunt Talia Shire [Connie Corleone in The Godfather films] who first said to me, ‘Naturalism is a style.' And I was also a big believer in arts synchronicity, and that what you could do with one art form you could do and another meaning. You know, in painting, for example, you can get abstract, you can get photorealistic, you can get impressionistic, why not try that with film performance?”
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Audiences can next expect to see Cage in what promises to be his Cage-iest performance yet. He'll play a neurotic version of... himself in Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, paired alongside the likes of Neil Patrick Harris, Pedro Pascal, and Tiffany Hadish. While he's heard it's good, he's not gonna see it—"it's just too much of a whacked-out trip for me to go to a movie theater and watch me play [Gormican]'s highly-neurotic, anxiety-ridden version of me," he told us earlier this year. "I won't see it," he continues, "but I do hope you enjoy it."
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters on April 22. Pig, on the other hand, is available for digital purchase right now, or you can stream it on Hulu.