How Nicolas Cage became a horror and B-movie legend

It's difficult to know where to begin with Nicolas Cage. On the one hand, he's an acting legend — a decorated performer with an Oscar to his name and collaborations with the biggest and best filmmakers. But on the other hand, he's an enigmatic meme machine, cranking out performances so absurd that they can only live in pretty rubbish direct-to-DVD trash.

Things weren't always this way for Cage. He started his career in the 1980s with a handful of teen movies, having changed his surname to avoid allegations of nepotism — his uncle is The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. By the end of the decade, he was working with the likes of the Coen Brothers and David Lynch, on Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart respectively.

In the 90s, Cage was on top of the world. He was a box office dynamo and action hero in the likes of Con Air, The Rock and Face/Off, but also earned the biggest critical acclaim of his career — as well as that Oscar — for Leaving Las Vegas. The 2000s furthered his box office credentials with the National Treasure movies, as well as his brush with superheroics in Ghost Rider.

But then, things began to change a little. The rise of the internet and social media turned Cage's deliberately bombastic and idiosyncratic performance style — which he himself has described as "Nouveau Shamanic" — into a meme.

Read more: Nicolas Cage reveals why he turned down roles in The Matrix and Lord of The Rings (The Independent)

Suddenly, past Cage performances became fodder for internet hilarity. Chief among these were the 1989 black comedy Vampire's Kiss and the disastrous 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. The idea of "Cage Rage" became notorious, especially as his antics are even funnier and more baffling out of the context of the films in which they appear. Brief clips turned Cage's most unusual moments into infamous skits.

Watch: Nicolas Cage stars in a notorious scene from Vampire's Kiss

Around this time, Cage's career changed too. His heavy investments in real estate began to bite him and he ended up owing the IRS tens of millions of dollars. As he himself reflected to GQ of this time: "I've got all these creditors and the IRS and I'm spending $20,000 a month trying to keep my mother out of a mental institution, and I can't. It was just all happening at once.”

Read more: How Nicolas Cage wildly blew his entire fortune (LoveMONEY)

The star refused to file for bankruptcy. Instead, he worked. Throughout the 2010s, Cage appeared in around 30 direct-to-DVD movies, of wildly varying quality. It took until around 2021 for Cage to completely clear his debts. Most of these movies have terrible, generic titles like Justice or Stolen or Kill Chain and they only exist in the deep bowels of streaming services or supermarket shelves.

But for Cage, they served a financial purpose. They also incubated this perception of him as a walking meme, especially when he leaned in to the madness as strongly as he did for the 2017 horror-comedy Mom and Dad. This work was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it increased his profile at a time when his work was going largely unnoticed. But it also put Cage into a pigeonhole. And if anyone hates pigeonholes, it's an actor like Nicolas Cage.

Cage's way out of that pigeonhole has been to embrace and twist his own meme fame. His work in Panos Cosmatos' lurid psychological horror movie Mandy in 2018 appeared to play with his own online persona. Promoting the film in a chat with IndieWire, he said he found the idea of Cage Rage to be "frustrating" and said the internet had "done the movie a disservice" by lumping it in with his extreme work.

He delivered self-referential animated performances in the superhero one-two punch of Teen Titans Go! To the Movies and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, while deliberately silencing himself in Willy's Wonderland and going thoughtful for Michael Sarnoski's Pig.

Read more: Dream Scenario is a response to the 'meme-ification of so-called Nic Cage' (Yahoo Entertainment)

All of this came to a head with 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage sought to draw a line under his own career trajectory. He played a version of himself who, in order to solve his financial problems, agreed to be the guest of honour at a wealthy superfan's birthday party.

The film was almost entirely free of snark and unfolded as an earnest celebration of all things Cage, from the sublime to the ridiculous. It feels like an exorcism of sorts for an actor looking to put his notoriety behind him in search of something different.

In 2021, Cage told Variety he'd never watch it. He said: "I’m told it’s a good movie. I’m told people love it and are enjoying the ride, but I made that for the audience. It’s too much for me to go to the premiere and sit there with everybody. Psychologically, that’s too bizarre and whacked out for me."

Read more: Nicolas Cage says he regrets eating a cockroach in the 1988 film 'Vampire's Kiss' (Insider)

Cage now has the freedom to choose whatever weird projects he wants. The lifelong Nosferatu obsessive leapt at the chance to play Dracula in last year's horror-comedy Renfield and he finally got to be a live-action Superman in The Flash.

Genre is where Cage wants to live during this phase of his career and he's now receiving some of his best ever reviews for the new horror movie Longlegs. His performance as the titular serial killer has been deliberately concealed from the unorthodox marketing campaign, but the reviews are now highlighting his transformative work as a career highlight.

There aren't many actors who can boast as vibrant and unusual a career trajectory as Nicolas Cage. But ultimately, as he enters the final phase of that career, he has secured the freedom to do whatever the hell he wants. And it turns out that what he wants is to be a creepy serial killer. You have to respect that.

Longlegs is in UK cinemas from 12 July.