Nicolas Cage Can Explain It All

Fifteen minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, into a tranquil gated community, up a red-brick driveway, past the palm trees that touch the Mojave Desert sky, through the veil that separates the astral plane, and here he is: the man they say gained and lost a $150 million fortune; who owned castles in Europe and the most haunted house in America and the Shah of Iran’s Lamborghini and two albino king cobras and a rare two-headed snake; who had to return his prized dinosaur skull upon learning it was stolen from Mongolia; who went on an epic quest for the actual Holy Grail; and who—when his singular, fantastical life eventually comes to an end—will be laid to eternal rest in a colossal white pyramid tomb in New Orleans.

Nicolas Cage greets me at his door, wearing a kung fu suit.

“This is my Wing Chun kung fu suit,” he explains, waving me in and handing me a mug of coffee. “I studied with my sifu, Jim Lau, when I was 12 years old, because I was a big Bruce Lee fan. And so it’s like my uniform to relax in.”

His voice is a low, contemplative drawl that imbues every word with a sense of philosophical magnitude. To hear Nicolas Cage state an opinion about his preferred loungewear is to hear anyone else reflect on the cosmos.

“I’m still decorating, so excuse me,” he says, as we stroll through his home. An imposing mahogany cuckoo clock chimes on the half-hour. Mighty bronze dragons guard the hall. Lacquered arms holding torches sprout from eggplant purple walls, lighting the way. Look down and you have a Persian rug ripped out of a Lisa Frank coloring book. Look up, you have a crystal chandelier and an original Creature From the Black Lagoon poster. Straight ahead: a prince! Specifically, a huge photograph of Prince roller-skating in hot pants and a Batman tank top. At the heart of the house is a charcoal drawing of his late father, August Floyd Coppola, who looms over the fireplace, and everything else.

Cage moved into this place last summer but settled in Vegas back in 2006. He came for the state taxes (there are none), though he soon learned to love the small-town feel and the ability to drop off the radar. “In some ways,” he says, “this move saved me.”

His best friend rests in a nearby chair, sizing me up. He has the regal bearing of an emperor, with an elegant mane of gray hair and wise golden eyes and a luxurious tail and, okay, yes, he is a cat. A Maine coon named Merlin. “He’s so kind and so loving,” Cage tells me, more than once. “Sometimes he puts his arm around me when he’s sleeping, and I think it’s my wife, and I go, ‘Oh, Riko.’ And then it’s Merlin.”

The owner of his favorite local pet store died recently, so Cage scooped up some of the leftover animals stuck in limbo. A couple turtles, a fish with a bum eye that he felt bad for. They live in an array of aquariums lining his kitchen and bar counters (his Oscar is somewhere up there, too). “My job is to care for them, make sure they’re happy and safe,” he says as we stop to watch a freshwater turtle wade around. “Eventually, I’ll have to donate him, like I donated my two-headed snake to the Audubon Zoo.”

That snake came to him in a dream. Or, rather, he had been dreaming of two-headed eagles and then the very next day, a guy called to sell him a two-headed snake for $80,000. After immediately taking him up on the offer, Cage learned that to feed it, he had to put a spatula between the heads to prevent them from fighting over their food and this was all way too much to handle, so the snake was re-homed to the zoo, where it only recently died at the ripe old age of 14.

These moments can happen with Cage, when you suddenly find your spirit levitating an inch outside your body, while you’re locked into a description of a situation that could not have happened to anyone else on the planet. And isn’t this what I expected? That I would come to his enchanted lair and talk about the snakes and skulls and other oddities—maybe getting injured by a samurai sword or something in the process, though hopefully nothing too grievous, so that I could still tell you about the snakes and skulls and other oddities.

What I encountered instead was something more surprising: a human being who has been to some serious depths, much of it public, much more of it not, and emerged with a new and better understanding of himself and his life. He has spent recent days this winter mostly inside, reading scripts and watching movies and preparing to welcome a baby with his wife of a year, Riko Shibata. They have the names picked out already: Akira Francesco for a boy and Lennon Augie for a girl. “Augie was my father’s nickname. And my uncle”—the director Francis Ford Coppola—“has decided to change his name to Francesco,” he says, excitedly showing me the two-month ultrasound on his phone. “I think it’s so sweet. It’s like a little edamame. A little bean.”

We will settle in his sitting room, where, over many mugs of coffee, I will try to square the sensitive, self-aware person in front of me with the fairly ridiculous myth that exists in our culture’s collective imagination. And he will, in turn, explain everything to me that is seemingly inexplicable about Nicolas Cage.

First, though, I want to meet his talking crow. His name is Huginn, and Cage says it was “love at first sight.” He swoops around a massive geodesic dome, so we inch up to the edge and peer inside. Huginn has gleaming black feathers all over, except for his chest, which is an unexpected shock of pure white. He flies up to a perch, where he can scrutinize us at eye level. I hold my breath.

“Huginn, this is Gabriella,” Cage says.

“Hi,” Huginn says.

In the sitting room, I see him clearly for the first time. He is 58 now. Tall and still slender, with close-cropped dark hair. His face, which we’ve watched in one form or another for practically his entire life, has been softened by age. It is a kaleidoscope. A minuscule change of expression or lighting and one of his characters will jump out at you: the hotheaded, wooden-handed baker (Moonstruck), the alcoholic screenwriter scraping rock bottom (Leaving Las Vegas), the burned-out paramedic (Bringing Out the Dead), the affable ex-con (Raising Arizona), the other affable ex-con (Con Air), the good cop (It Could Happen to You), the bad cop (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), both the villain and the hero, who have swapped faces with the aid of cutting-edge ’90s super science (Face/Off), Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation).

Robust eyebrows frame the hardest-working pair of blue eyes in the business. “There’s a spiritual conflict in Nick’s eyes and in his face,” Martin Scorsese told me. “It’s visible, it’s open, and it translates into an overall sense of unease. The conflict is an inner questioning: Will I be redeemed? Have I done enough?”

Redemption does seem to have arrived for Cage, at long last. After falling millions of dollars into debt, and then working tirelessly to dig himself out, he has made many movies—too many movies—that only reinforced the idea that Cage was maybe a little insane. And yet, through the 12 years that followed the death of his beloved father, the turmoil of near-bankruptcy, and the big studios turning their backs on him, Cage has stayed committed to delivering flashes of his highly personal brilliance in smaller projects. Like in 2018’s Mandy, as a bereaved lumberjack in the woods who’s lost everything he loves. Or last year’s Pig, as a bereaved chef in the woods who’s lost everything he loves. And in doing so, he’s reminded people what they’ve always known: Nicolas Cage is one of our greatest actors.

It is this moment and context into which past and present and real and fake will all collide in his new film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In 2019, Cage received a letter from director Tom Gormican with a proposition. Gormican and writer Kevin Etten had just finished a screenplay they wanted Cage to consider. He would be playing a character named: Nick Cage. This Nick Cage is a washed-up action star down on his luck who gets roped into a CIA plot to take down an international arms dealer. The film uses de-aging technology to also render Cage into a second character—a younger, wilder, uncannily smooth version of himself who goes by Nicky.

Cage had some qualms about spelunking into his psyche for this. “Tom always said the neurotic Nick Cage is the best Nick Cage,” Cage tells me. “I said, ‘It’s not all neurotic, Tom.’ I mean, I have very quiet moments at home, just sitting on a couch or looking at CNN or reading a Murakami book.” He feared he would be making a joke out of himself. And he definitely didn’t love that the character is a narcissistic and aloof father. But he was ultimately intrigued by the chance to remind audiences of his comedy chops and even signed on as a producer of the film, which will be distributed by Lionsgate. If the big studios no longer had faith in Nicolas Cage the actor, they apparently had it in spades for Nicolas Cage the persona.

That persona has been with us since Cage’s career began to accelerate in the late ’80s and the early ’90s. It was, at first, a monster of his own making. Take the press tour for the 1990 David Lynch fever dream Wild at Heart, when Cage front handspringed and karate-kicked his way onto the British talk show Wogan, before fully peeling off his T-shirt and finishing the interview sweaty and bare-chested under his leather jacket. (Terry Wogan’s first question: “Do you get carried away?”) In Unbearable Weight, Nicky is styled after that particular appearance. “Nick would tell us, ‘I look back, and I hate that guy,’ ” Gormican said.

Cage is a little more circumspect with me. It’s more that he doesn’t want to be that guy anymore. Hasn’t wanted to since he had his first child, at 26. (Cage has two sons, Weston, 31, and Kal-El, 16.) “I had some moments that I went off and did some wild stuff, but a lot of that was by design,” he says. “I think many people in the public got swept up with an idea of me being kind of a wild madman, which was fun in the beginning.” But after Cage became one of the most bankable leading men from the mid-’90s to the mid-’00s, he started to lose control of his persona. First, there was YouTube, then one social media platform after another. When his career and finances started to suffer around 2010, the internet went into overdrive. His performances—which, while colorful, were at least mostly tuned to the movies they were in—were plucked out of context and spliced together into “Nicolas Cage Freak-Out Montage” or “40 clips of Nicolas Cage screaming in one minute” or “Nicolas Cage Ultimate Freakouts (UNCENSORED version).” Millions of views later, a life onscreen was distilled into farce.

He became something of a meme ouroboros: The platforms would go out hunting for Nick Cage being outrageous and they would find him—say, talking about doing mushrooms with his cat on Letterman or telling a reporter about the time he was stalked by a mime—which would only make them want to go out hunting for Cage being even more outrageous. Mandy co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn told me a story about when they were filming in the Belgian woods in 2017. He had asked Cage what he had gotten up to over the weekend. Usually the answer was that the actor had stayed in watching esoteric world cinema, but in this case, Cage had flown to Kazakhstan for a film festival. A photo of Cage in traditional Kazakh dress ended up going viral—and then was inserted into hundreds of other absurd contexts. “Nick was like, ‘Well, I went to Kazakhstan, and I became a fucking meme,’ ” Stewart-Ahn recalled. “Then he says, ‘Hey, why don’t you take a picture of me right now, in this forest, with blood on my face? Post it online, and we’ll make a real meme.’ ”

Cage took umbrage when he first saw the photoshopping and the supercuts all those years ago, but then more or less came to accept it. “You can’t go against that which is,” he says, shrugging. In all fairness, the internet lore has, in its own way, made him more beloved than ever. Seldom has an actor inspired such a rabid, reverent following. His fans worship at the altar of the r/onetruegod subreddit and get his face tattooed on their bodies and attend daylong Nick Cage movie marathons, after which they go home to rest their weary heads on multiple versions of Nick Cage novelty sequin pillows.

That doesn’t mean he’s entirely comfortable with where his public persona exists in 2022. For a while, Saturday Night Live had a recurring segment featuring Andy Samberg as a gleefully psychotic version of the actor. Cage gamely appeared alongside him in 2012, referencing National Treasure with the punch line: “We’re gonna have a three-way with the Declaration of Independence.” Now he says the show is asking him to host this spring, but he’s not so sure. “I feel like saying, ‘Well, why don’t you call Andy Samberg? I mean, I hear he’s available.’ ”

I ask him if he sees Unbearable Weight as a chance to seize control over the meme-fied version of himself and get the last word. How could anything possibly top Nick Cage playing Nick Cage as the most Nick Cage thing to ever happen? “There was an element of that in it. I think it was a way of embracing what had happened to me,” he says. He even pushed the envelope further at times. In one scene, Cages young and old make out with each other. “That was Nick’s idea,” Gormican told me. “He was supposed to kiss him on the cheek, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’d like to French kiss.’ ”

But even if Cage has grown willing to participate in the fervor, much of it remains elusive to him. “I still don’t really fully understand what the fascination is with my face or facial expressions that happen in these memes,” he says. The studio is trying to push this promotional Walmart campaign around Unbearable Weight, he tells me, photoshopping his face on posters for other Lionsgate movies, from John Wick to Terminator 2. “I’m like, well, but why?” Cage says. “Just like, What is it?”

When he was five years old and still known as Nicolas Kim Coppola, Cage went to visit his composer grandfather, Carmine. He spotted a tray with a portrait painted on it and asked his grandfather who it was. Carmine said it was a composer named Beethoven. “And I said, ‘Oh? Was he any good?’ ” Cage recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, he was about as good as I am.’ I went home and I told my father that. He was furious.”

Carmine may not have been Beethoven, but he went on to win the Oscar for the score to The Godfather Part II, which his son, Francis, directed and his daughter, Talia Shire, starred in. (As a kid, Cage horsed around on that set with his cousins.) Cage came into the world in Long Beach, California, to this remarkably erudite and accomplished family that would indelibly shape and influence him. But none more than his father, August, a professor of comparative literature. “He was always the smartest man in the room when he walked into any room,” Cage says. “He knew it, and he made sure we knew it.” August spoon-fed his boy Fellini and German expressionist cinema while raising him and his two older brothers mostly alone. Cage’s mother, a former dancer and choreographer named Joy Vogelsang, was institutionalized for schizophrenia and depression for much of his youth. His parents divorced when he was 12. Cage would watch his mother talk to the walls and absorb it as surrealistic inspiration. “I could have gone the other way,” he says. “Instead, I looked at her and I thought, Well, this is really interesting.”

If his father was responsible for fomenting a love of film, his uncle’s stature in the industry exposed him to a fascinating New Hollywood milieu. Hanging out after a screening of Apocalypse Now, he found himself face to face with Dennis Hopper in a cowboy hat, asking Cage what kind of music he liked. “I said, ‘I like classical music.’ He said, ‘Oh, you gotta listen to The Love for Three Oranges by Prokofiev,’ ” he says. “He was so interested in me listening to that music. He also seemed very avuncular to me.”

Francis cast him in a few early roles, but, wanting to shake off accusations of nepotism, Cage engaged in his first act of deliberate mythmaking. He changed his last name, inspired by the avant-garde composer John Cage and the Black superhero Luke Cage. As a young man, he had a particular notion of himself that he was determined to prove: “That I had something, and it wasn’t simply because I was born into a Coppola family. It was because I thought I had a unique way of feeling things and looking at things.”

He would go on to spend the next 40 years of his life on film sets. It can be hard to imagine any other reasonable outcome. “Nick is a born actor,” said Oliver Stone, who directed him in World Trade Center and Snowden. “If he wasn’t doing this, I don’t know what he’d do.”

“If Nick hadn’t been a movie star, he would’ve been a president,” his Pig costar Alex Wolff told me. “He’s just this magic orb that was supposed to do something magical.”

In his early 20s, he did just about everything he could to put himself on the map. While filming the experimental 1988 horror comedy Vampire’s Kiss, about a delusional yuppie literary agent named Peter Loew who thinks he’s a vampire, he famously insisted on eating a live cockroach for a shot. (He feels bad about the bug now.) He infused Peter with qualities from both parents, talking to the walls like his mother but in his father’s mid-Atlantic accent. This is still his favorite movie he’s ever made.

So adamant was he on pushing boundaries that he initially balked at doing Moonstruck because it seemed too safe of a romantic comedy. (To be clear, this is a movie in which his character is introduced sweatily waving around his wooden hand and bellowing, “Bring me the big knife!”) “Now looking at it, it’s definitely one of my favorite movies I made,” he says. “Plus, I like the presentation of the Italian American as a loving family. Not just always the gangster.”

Right before he won an Oscar in 1996 for his raw and intimate portrayal of a man intent on drinking himself to death, in the $3.5 million budget Leaving Las Vegas, a fairy godmother by the name of Jerry Bruckheimer cast him opposite Sean Connery in The Rock and sent him hurtling along on a run of popcorn movies. “He’s just wonderful,” Bruckheimer told me. “You never quite know what he’s going to do.” Even when the budgets had a few extra zeros tacked on for car chases and explosions, Cage would still sometimes try to channel the geist of German silent cinema. Cage laughs while remembering when he first let it rip as Castor Troy in Face/Off: “John Travolta was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to do that kind of acting.’ ”

He blossomed into a giant movie star. Our most baroque, sad-eyed movie star, but a movie star nonetheless. The director David Gordon Green, who worked with Cage on 2013’s Joe, told me about a time the two of them stopped at a roadside biker bar in the South: “A dude rolls up while we were having a drink. And you expect him to say, ‘Hey, man, I’m a big Face/Off fan’ or ‘Con Air‘s the shit.’ And the guy goes, ‘Man, I just have to tell you how much I loved Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.’ ”

With his missteps in the past decade, it is easy to overlook the fact that Cage has often found himself ahead of the culture. Vampire’s Kiss? Made zero money, but is now a cult classic. Moonstruck? Over three decades after its release, you can’t throw a stone in Brooklyn without hitting a millennial woman horny for Ronny Cammareri. All of his exaggerated and overblown performances? A recent trend piece in The New York Times pointed out that actors have been eschewing naturalism in favor of operatic gusto.

Perhaps the simplest idea that explains Cage is that he is a sincere man in an ironic world. “There’s not an ironic or cynical bone in his body,” Pig director Michael Sarnoski told me. Roger Ebert once wrote of his “inner trembling,” adding that “he always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience.” He’s been telling us all along. Remember his Oscars speech? “I know it’s not hip to say it,” he admitted, clutching his golden statue. “But I just love acting.”

Nothing about him feels like an affectation. Not the kung fu suit, not the talking crow. He is a true eccentric holdout in the increasingly banal landscape of American celebrity. You never see him posting on social media, flashing his veneers above a faux self-deprecating or inspirational caption, or giving pithy sound bites on a red carpet. The man is physically incapable of pith.

“He’s such a nice man, such a good man, and I think he also got so much misunderstanding,” Face/Off director John Woo said. “Some people even say he’s so weird, but I don’t think so. I think he’s pretty normal, and he just needs a friend—that’s all.”

When talking with people who have worked with Cage in the past couple decades it more or less went the same way: Look, they would say, everybody always asks me for a crazy Nick Cage story, but, on set, he’s as conscientious and hardworking as you can get.

“He’s deeply focused,” Unbearable Weight director Tom Gormican said. “He would elliptical from 3 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. every morning and read the rest of the script, and then send me a list of questions, thoughts, notes, and ideas for the day’s scene work.” The movie’s co-writer, Kevin Etten, called him “probably the hardest-working actor I’ve ever witnessed.”

“He goes to time-consuming depths, which you don’t see often as a director,” David Gordon Green said. “With him, it’s like, ‘What do you need, and what are you doing on Sunday? Let’s spend time and let’s talk about it.’ ” Green paused. “And he brings his own knife to the steak house, which I think is very cool. You go out to have a steak with Nick, and he unfolds this amazing hand-carved knife to be his cutlery.”

One thing Cage wants to make sure you know is that it wasn’t the skulls that did him in.

Especially not the $276,000 Tyrannosaurus bataar skull he reportedly outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for and then agreed to turn over when the Department of Homeland Security informed him it had been looted from Mongolia. No, it was mostly bad real-estate decisions. The grotesquely haunted LaLaurie mansion in New Orleans. The 16th-century Schloss Neidstein in Germany. The 18th-century Midford Castle in England. The Gray Craig estate in Rhode Island. Leaf Cay island in the Bahamas. More mortgages than he could keep up with and a bubble that burst on him, and everyone else, too. “I didn’t believe in stocks because I think they’re like gambling and they’re dangerous, but you can dump a stock,” he says, reflecting on the 2008 crash. “You can’t get out of real estate that quickly.”

In 2009, he sued his former business manager for allegedly leading him “down a path toward financial ruin.” The money manager countered with a suit about how he couldn’t control the actor’s profligate spending. Both suits were reportedly dismissed the following year. Whatever the case, Cage owed the IRS around $14 million and, to other creditors, millions more.

Though there was a period of Cage’s life when he raked in $20 million a movie, he grew up only in the shadow of wealth. Before directing Cage in the National Treasure movies, Jon Turteltaub was a classmate of his at Beverly Hills High. “He was a Beverly Hills outsider,” he told me. “He lived in an apartment with his dad, not in a house, and he didn’t have that kind of rich-kid patina. In one sense, it worked really well for him because it made him different and interesting. But I think he also felt a little disconnected.”

That wealth was just out of reach at home, as well. Cage would see his uncle Francis surrounded by opulence in Napa Valley, and even lived with him for a stint. In old interviews, Cage compares himself to the scheming orphan Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. “Oh, God,” he groans, when I bring it up now. “Maybe I was fascinated by my uncle’s lifestyle. My father was on a teacher’s salary. I would be in that little house in Long Beach, which was still a great house. But that notwithstanding, you go from there and you see Uncle’s house. I didn’t know what the cost of things were. I just liked what they looked like.”

Eventually he made enough money to buy the things he liked to look at. He purchased a home for his dad in Newport Beach, too. “It was like paradise. We used to go have abalone and martinis at 21 Oceanfront for lunch and talk,” he says. “I knew I gave him some happiness before he went.”

Things between them had been strained when Cage was younger, but they made their peace. “We were best friends,” he says. “We had this great relationship for years. That’s why I was so devastated when he left. He’d say, ‘Well, who’s Nicolas going to talk to when I’m gone?’ ”

So who did he talk to?

He smiles. “I tried to talk to Francesco, but I don’t know. I think I’m a little annoying.”

What followed his father’s death and his financial ruin was a decade-long odyssey to do as many movies as possible for as much money as possible to pay his debts. Movies which sometimes had summaries that began, “John Milton escapes from hell and steals Satan’s gun.” In the years since going broke, Cage appeared in 46 movies, an experience he likens to “a conveyor belt.” (By comparison, in that same time, Brad Pitt made 19, Tom Cruise, 11, and Leonardo DiCaprio, 9.)

Cage is matter-of-fact when he speaks about how he went from headlining blockbusters to going straight to VOD. “The phone stopped ringing,” he says. “It was like, ‘What do you mean we’re not doing National Treasure 3? It’s been 14 years. Why not?’ ” He would often get a circuitous answer, but he knew what the elephant in the room was. “Well, Sorcerer’s Apprentice didn’t work, and Ghost Rider didn’t really sell tickets. And Drive Angry, that just came and went.’ ”

Alongside the downturn in his career, we started to see the cracks in his personal life. There were the incidents of public drunkenness; his divorce from his wife of 12 years; the four-day marriage he subsequently entered into while intoxicated; the videos of him unwinding at karaoke after that ordeal, which were sold to TMZ.

There was much more that we didn’t see. Namely, him grieving his father and trying to take care of his elderly mother. “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,” he says. “It was just all happening at once.”

Cage was adamant that he would never file for bankruptcy, even when people kept telling him to press that button. And he wants to clear up a misconception about the work he took on to prevent that from happening. “When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all,” he says. “They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like Mandy, but some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring.”

Eventually, it added up. About a year and a half ago, he finished paying off all his debts.

But it was almost as if there was some kind of eerie Faustian bargain involved. The role that allowed him to write that big check to the IRS and finally be free and clear? It was the role of playing himself.

We meet again on a rainy and dark evening in New Orleans.

The staff at Antoine’s, an old French Quarter stalwart, buzz with palpable excitement, as if welcoming a visiting dignitary. Cage enters practically gliding in, wearing an emerald green suede jacket and putting in an order for their Baked Alaska before even sitting down because he wants me to try it. He seems about five inches taller. He’s in his element here, ready to hold court in a small private room with ruby red walls and a wine cellar. I remark, by way of paying a compliment, that I feel as if we’re in “The Cask of Amontillado.” “That story has crossed my mind more than a couple of times when I visited my uncle at the winery,” he jokes.

He’s in town doing preproduction work for Renfield, an upcoming monster movie directed by Chris McKay. He’s playing Dracula, for real this time, and he has an idea of who he’ll be channeling. “August Coppola’s coming back,” Cage says. “And he’s coming back as Dracula.”

There are ghosts everywhere. This is what happens when you have a history with a place. Cage has lived in New Orleans and filmed some of his most memorable movies here. Here is where he “began to understand more of the romantic world,” he says. “This is a city that can have that dark side. It’s very present. And the reality is, we both know I’m probably never really going to leave New Orleans.”

Well, yes. Because of the tomb.

“I’m not going to talk about that,” Cage says, drawing his hands up and smiling. I say I saw it for myself the day before and he seems surprised, but nods. “Well. You can talk about it.”

Okay, here goes: When Cage ultimately passes, he will be buried in the historic St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, which is one of this country’s most exclusive places to spend eternity. His tomb is a flawless white pyramid, about nine feet tall. On the afternoon I visit, the sun bathes it in golden light, illuminating the inscription omnia ab uno. Latin for “Everything from one.” A crow flies overhead, beating its wings furiously, as our tour guide hams it up: “There are no human remains in this tomb…merely the remains of his career!” (“Recently, some of his work has been getting better,” he admits in the next breath. “I can’t wait for the new one coming out, where he plays himself.”) After we disperse 30 minutes later, I ask the guide for some local tomb gossip. He says the word around town is that a cemetery guard once saw it get struck by lightning, that Cage reportedly shelled out $250,000, and that the actor bought it to lift a curse placed on him for purchasing the LaLaurie mansion. To be clear, the guide adds, this is all a load of malarkey.

The tomb is held up as the conclusive example of his eccentricity, the ultimate example of Nicolas Cage Being Nicolas Cage. But I want you to consider that he made the purchase in 2010—for $20,000, by the way—after everything started going downhill in the year prior. That his father had only recently died. That beneath every one of his enigmas is something much more straightforward. And that he does, at least, say this much: “I’m told that in some parts of Asia, like Korea, that if you make your plans in advance, that it actually means good luck and you have a healthy life. Also, it’s just a wise thing to do to take pressure off your family. Who wants to be dealing with all that when someone’s passed on?”

It’s understandable that he doesn’t want to get into it, considering the other misconception top of mind tonight. Such as: “The misconception that I’m crazy, which people seem to enjoy, the madman or whatever—to which I simply say you can’t survive 43 years in Hollywood or star in over 120 movies if you’re crazy. You’re not going to get bonded. They’re not going to work with you,” he says.

“You’ve got to be healthy,” he adds. “My doctor says I have the liver of a 13-year-old choir boy, you know?”

Over dinner, he downs enough Diet Coke and black coffee to fill the Mississippi, while exercising monk-like restraint around his charbroiled oysters and soft shell crab. (“This isn’t really on my diet right now,” he says, sighing. “I’m trying to become the Thin White Duke for Dracula.”) Alcohol is completely off the table when he’s working. “I have to focus, and it leads to anxiety,” he says. “It’s so hard to retain the dialogue if you’re doing that.” How then, does he account for his drunken incidents? “It’s like an eraser on a chalkboard, but it’s a slippery slope because I don’t drink often,” he says. “And when you do that, you’re out of practice.”

The marriages, too, have been some of the more salacious parts of his story in the public imagination. Twenty-seven-year-old Shibata is his fifth wife. “I am a romantic, and when I’m in love, I want to give that person everything I can,” he says. “It’s my expression of saying, ‘I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ And this is it for me.” He shakes his head and looks down at his plate, speaking to himself more than to me. “I mean, this is not happening again. This is it. This is it.”

He’s thinking about the fresh start he’s been granted. About how he probably wouldn’t have ever done something like Pig, the performance that definitively broke his long spell of dismal reception, if he had continued on the blockbuster path. About how, after more than a hundred movies, that was the one where he finally felt fully seasoned. He remembers something an old friend would tell him. “Sean Connery used to always say, ‘You have to know how to enter the room. When you’ve entered the room, they notice,’ ” he says. “In that movie, I thought I had entered the room.”

Cage wants to keep going with the indies. “I enjoy making movies like Pig and Leaving Las Vegas more than I enjoy making movies like National Treasure,” he says. He waves away suggestions that National Treasure 3 is happening, after I mention that Jerry Bruckheimer told me they were developing something. “When I talk about fair-weather friends in Hollywood, I’m not talking about Jerry. I’m talking about Disney,” he says. “They’re like an ocean liner. Once they go in a certain direction, you’ve got to get a million tugboats to try to swivel it back around.”

He may reunite with his uncle for the first time since 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married—they’re talking about a small role in Coppola’s upcoming epic Megalopolis. “I’m just going to focus on being extremely selective, as selective as I can be,” he says. “I would like to make every movie as if it were my last.”

Death is certain, and he is prepared, but there is an opportunity now to rewrite his way out. His debts are paid. His career has re-railed. He has remarried and is welcoming new life. But he still keeps the past close. He and Shibata wed on his father’s birthday. When they finally take their honeymoon, it will be to Venice. And the reason why involves yet another great Nicolas Cage story.

His father had always wanted his ashes scattered in the Grand Canal. Cage used to own a yacht, so this would have been a relatively easy task, but he had to sell it before August died. Soon after his father passes, Cage starts having these recurring dreams of August playing kick the can in the street. Cage takes this as a sign: His father is waiting and waiting in the afterlife for his son to fulfill his promise.

So he secures the box with his ashes and goes to the airport. “Now I’m like a live wire,” he says. “I don’t want anything to go wrong. I’ve got to accomplish this. And I’m in full-on grief.” The box with his father’s ashes is going through airport security at LAX and they’re pulling him aside to inspect it and he’s insisting, “No, it’s my dad. It’s not a bomb. It’s my dad.”

He finally gets through and catches a plane to Frankfurt. When he lands there, he meets a helpful airport employee and catches a glimpse at her name tag: Savannah. Savannah! That’s where his dad was living before he moved back to California.

Okay, he thinks. Maybe he’s trying to say something to me. And Savannah gets him on this tiny prop plane to Venice. “The whole time,” he says, “I feel like he’s talking to me, almost like a radio.”

He lands and boards a water taxi, and he can finally breathe a little, as he and his dad float down the centuries-old canal. “And now it’s midnight, and it’s a full moon, and it’s Halloween,” he says. “And I’m pouring his ashes in the water.” And then? “All the church bells start ringing—all at the same time.” Life. Death. Rebirth. Everything from one.

Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2022 issue with the title “Nick Cage Can Explain It All.”

Watch Now:

Behind The Scenes with Cover Star Nicolas Cage

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Simon Rasmussen
Grooming by Kumi Craig using Dr. Loretta at the Wall Group
Tailoring by Laura Shrewsbury
Prop styling by Chere Theriot
Snake provided by Milliken Farms
Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions
Special thanks to Averett Ranch