We’ve reached the point in Nicolas Cage’s career when it’s easiest to refer to every new movie he’s in by just describing his antics in them. Dracula Cage, terrible boss — that’s “Renfield.” Moody chef Cage, retriever of beloved animal — that’s “Pig.” Serial killer Cage, servant of Satan — that’s “Longlegs.”
The tactic works because it’s easy to imagine Cage donning any of those guises, and a thousand more besides. Many a commenter has noted Cage’s propensity for roles that can be described only as crazy, but the actor’s career is too expansive, and often more nuanced, to be reduced to his unhinged characters. Tell me he’s going to play, I don’t know, a ballet master or a mob boss or an enraged father (as in his latest movie, “The Surfer”) and I’ll believe you, because Cage has proved that he contains multitudes, over and over again. Sometimes he even plays more than one guy in the same movie — as in my favorite of his films, “Adaptation,” in which he appears as twins.
That means the best way to get a grip on Cage as an artist is to consider him through his many faces. Even when he occasionally takes that face, um, off.
‘Moonstruck’ (1987)
The Sincere Love Interest
Early on, Cage worked to establish a career apart from his family name. (The “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle, and the directors Roman and Sofia Coppola and the actor Jason Schwartzman are his cousins.) He managed it swiftly in a string of movies that included many performances as a tousled, passionate, somewhat unpredictable young man. What shines through each is a full-bodied commitment to whatever the character’s emotional reality is — all the roiling desires, the suffering, the ecstasy.
A great representative performance from this era is his turn as the lovelorn hothead Ronny, who’s smitten with his brother’s fiancée (Cher) in the 1987 romantic comedy “Moonstruck.” Ronny may be missing a hand thanks to a freak bread-slicer accident, but he’s not missing any gallantry, rough-hewn as it is. It’s a charming, uncouth, amorous role, and versions of that Cage show up in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona” (1987) and David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990).
(Stream “Moonstruck” on the Roku Channel and the Criterion Channel, or rent it on most major platforms.)
‘Con Air’ (1997)
The Action Star
Many a broad-shouldered Hollywood man has turned to stunt-filled flicks, and Cage is no exception. A lot of action films are as flimsy as the paper the script was printed on, but when he seems invested in the role, Cage often brings them some heft. In “Con Air” (1997), for instance, the movie around him is rather silly — he’s the former-inmate hero on a transport plane full of convicts — but there’s something soulful and textured about his work that goes far beyond what the film requires. And he can also throw a convincing punch.
(Rent “Con Air” on most major platforms.)
‘Longlegs’ (2024)
The Kooky Contortionist
Cage tends to bring out his weirdest performances for films with small enough budgets to let the filmmakers go wild. There’s a good chance you haven’t seen a lot of these, though the 2018 revenge fantasia “Mandy” garnered a considerable cult following.
Seeing Cage in Osgood Perkins’s “Longlegs” during the hottest days of 2024 certainly seemed like the apex of this character, the sort of role that haunts you long after the movie is over. As a serial killer terrorizing young girls and their families, he’s very nearly unrecognizable, skin bleached out and jowls added to stringy hair and a terrifying grin that made me want to disappear behind my popcorn bucket. This kind of role is less about Cage being strange and more about his willingness to do anything for a performance, no matter how unrecognizable he is.
(Stream “Longlegs” on Hulu or rent it on most major platforms.)
‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ (2023)
The Self-Parodist
Cage knows he has a public reputation for being intense, explosive, a little deranged and prolific, a kind of living, breathing meme. In recent years, he’s leaned into that persona as a bit of a joke. The 2023 drama “Dream Scenario” played on this: He portrays a hapless professor who starts showing up in the dreams of scores of strangers and at first enjoys the media attention it brings. It’s a movie about the delights and dangers of widespread fame, which he certainly knows something about.
But it’s really in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” (also 2023) that he lets this winking, self-knowing face show. He plays the actor Nick Cage, who’s hanging out with a superfan (Pedro Pascal). It’s full of wry references to Cage’s best-known movies, a comedy about being the Nick Cage we think we know.
(Rent “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” on most major platforms.)
‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (2010)
The ‘I Need a Paycheck’ Guy
Look, everybody needs to pay the bills. Cage has occasionally gotten himself in financial hot water, with his real estate sprees and wackadoodle purchases (a $276,000 dinosaur skull) drawing attention from the news media.
You can usually tell when Hollywood actors have debts to pay, because they start taking inexplicable roles (and sometimes commercial endorsements). In Cage’s case, though, the paycheck movies get more boring — no greater example than the 2010 version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Cage brings some eccentricity but mostly a sense of obligation to the somewhat lifeless remake of the Disney classic. Which is all that script calls for.
(Stream “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” on Disney+ or rent it on most major platforms.)
‘PIG’ (2021)
The Thespian
Here’s the thing: Cage is a great actor. Not just because he has range, but also because he has great depths and can plumb them, especially for less showy roles. His only Oscar came in 1996, for Mike Figgis’s “Leaving Las Vegas” as an alcoholic screenwriter who’s decided to drink himself to death. In “City of Angels” (1998), “Bringing Out the Dead” (1999) and “Joe” (2014), he takes on similarly dramatic roles with unforgettable results.
One of his greatest performances came in the 2021 character drama “Pig,” in which he plays a bereaved, furious chef who journeys through the Portland culinary scene and its underworld in search of his beloved truffle-hunting pig, which has been stolen from him. His character is taciturn, a mountain of a man who seems both fully controlled and ready to erupt, and Cage keeps you on your toes the whole way. Near the end, he cooks a meal with a very specific purpose, and it’s utterly indelible.
(Stream “Pig” on Paramount+ or rent it on most major platforms.)
‘Adaptation’ (2002)
The Chameleon
It’s hard to nail down Nicolas Cage. What he’s doing in any given movie can vacillate and swing around and run off the rails, and sometimes it’s just hard to say anything definitive about the role. In “Adaptation” (2002), he plays both the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who actually wrote the screenplay) and his fictional twin brother, Donald. Charlie is an obsessive, sweaty, stressed-out ball of anxiety, while Donald is breezy and brash and confident in a way he hasn’t really earned. It is a bananas movie, delightful and strange. But watching Cage play temperamentally opposed twins next to one another, you start to see how much he contains, what his long, expressive face can do.
Cage’s latest film, “The Surfer,” could be summarized this way: Business Guy Cage gets stranded in a parking lot at the beach for reasons that would approach the Kafka-esque if they weren’t so driven by his bruised ego. Then he slowly goes nuts while being bullied by an Australian surfer wellness cult under the oppressive sun. You might think you know what his performance will be like from that description, but you’d probably be a little wrong, because there’s one thing that’s always true of Cage: just when you get a handle on him, he shows you something you’ve never seen before.
(Rent “Adaptation” on most major platforms.)
Videos: MGM (“Moonstruck”); Touchstone Pictures (“Con Air”); C2 Motion Picture Group (“Longlegs”); Lionsgate (“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”); Walt Disney Pictures (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”); AI Film (“PIG”); Columbia Pictures (“Adaptation”)
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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