It helps that he largely lives in his own
Cage-curated bubble. Nowadays he stays off the
internet and no longer appears on talk shows.
He lives a relatively quiet life, dividing his time
between Las Vegas and the tiny Somerset
village of Baltonsborough, five miles outside
of Glastonbury, where he has kept a home for
the past 14 years. Local press reported that he
rang in the new year in a Somerset working
men’s club, where he happily posed for photos
and bought everyone a round. “I just enjoy
that part of the world,” he says. “I enjoy the
rolling hills and the green and the oak trees,
and I enjoy the people in Somerset. Obviously,
the cider and cheddar cheese is enjoyable.
I like to read my books and go into Glastonbury
town and feel like I’m walking through a pack
of tarot cards.”
The work is the focus. He speaks earnestly
and thoughtfully about performance. His
unique style of acting, which he calls ‘Nouveau
Shamanic’, inspired by the Brian Bates book
The Way Of Wyrd, ignores the widely accepted
principles of performance.
“To break form with typical narrative film
performance, I thought: ‘Well, let’s not get
totally obsessed with naturalism.’ The only way
I thought I could go into the surrealistic
approach was to explore characters that were
either a) losing their minds, b)‘on something ’,
or c) under the influence of something
supernatural or alien. That’s why I always
enjoyed science-fiction, why I’ve enjoyed horror
— because it provides a mechanism where
I can explore my surrealistic film performance
dreams.”MandyandColor Out Of Space, by that
token, are dream gigs.INMANDY, CAGE plays an understated
lumberjack whose girlfriend is kidnapped and
killed by a murderous cult and a demon biker
gang, only to seek bloody revenge while off his
face on LSD -laced cocaine. InColor Out Of Space
he plays an alpaca farmer whose entire family
lose their minds after a glowing purple alien
meteorite lands in their garden, spewing
supernatural force. The criteria for a), b) and
c) all satisfied there.
The attention, as ever, is on Cage’s hinges
flying loose. But these characters are as much
ordinary, understated men as they are beset
by monstrous challenges. “Ever since I’d seen
James Dean’sEast Of Eden, I’ve loved family
drama,” he says. “If you take horror, and all the
imagination and surrealism that horror can
provide, and you collide it with the mundane
or the ordinary, it becomes a great mix.” In
Color Out 0f Space, the descent of his character,
Nathan Gardner, into extra-terrestrial madness
is deliberately incremental. “The way I approached
it was, the more average I can make Nathan
Gardner, the more terrifying the overall influence
of the alien energy will be — so that the surreal
and the fantastic of the alien energy becomes
more compelling.”
In both films, he digs deep into a personal
well, too. ForMandy— a staggering exploration
of grief, among other things — he channelled
emotions felt from the loss of his father, August
Coppola, some years before. ForColor Out Of
Space, he actually adopts his late father’s voice;
as Nathan’s descent into madness grows, he
begins to speak in an uncanny, vaguely English
accent. That, says Cage, is pure August.
“I start mimicking my father,” he explains.
“In fact, we came up with the idea that we should
go back toVampire’s Kiss, that voice which is
actually the voice of my actual father. I used to
call it his ‘Continental BS’ voice. I could never
understand, growing up with him, what this voice
was. ‘What are you doing, trying to sound like
you’re from England?’ He would go, ‘I’m an English
professor. I need to speak with distinction.’
Understandably, if he was going to teach English,he wanted his students to hear proper English.
But if he got angry, it was terrifying.”
Finding that groove between human drama
and otherworldly insanity can be a delicate
balance. Cage needs the right collaborators. He
seems to have found a kindred spirit inColor Out
Of Spacedirector Richard Stanley, who he bonded
with over a shared love of the Dark Ages and
Arthurian legends. “We have similar interests,
philosophically,” Cage agrees. “It didn’t surprise
me that he comes off a bit like some sort of
sorcerer. I remember once, he said, ‘I’m gonna
bring blood from a stone!’ He had these two
small meteorites and he rubbed them together
and this red liquid started emerging from them.
I thought that was fascinating.” Curiously for an
American and a South African, they also bonded
over a familiarity with the West Country. “He
knows a lot of the people I know in Glastonbury —
some of the people in the magic shops,” he says.
With hisMandydirector Panos Cosmatos
— who was inspired to write the film after losing
both his parents — Cage found a colleague he
could trust, one who understood his versatility
and trusted him to let loose. “The main thing
for me is I like directors who don’t fix things
that aren’t broken,” he says. “I’ve been very
fortunate with filmmakers that genuinely care
about performance.”
He certainly dabbles in mainstream
Hollywood much less than he used to: the recently
announcedNational Treasure 3will be his first
major studio film in almost a decade. The advent
of streaming has allowed space for the smaller,
weirder films that can accommodate Nouveau
Shamanism. In America,Color Out Of Spacehad
a simultaneous streaming and theatrical release
— in love with the grandiose visuals, Cage was
hopeful it might hit some cinema screens, too, and
it did. “There is risk aversion [in Hollywood],
especially if a movie is really expensive,” he says.
“And it’s understandable. But the good news for
me is that streaming allows these experimental
and original storylines. Stylisations with film
performance can still be deployed.” The newAbove:Possibly his most psychedelic and offbeat film ever,
Cage playsMandy’s lumberjack-turned-brutal LSD-powered
avenger, Red Miller.❯