Real Hilarious Reason Nicolas Cage Started Taking Horrible Roles in Recent Years
After his former co-star Sean Penn made an insulting comment about his career, Nicolas Cage explained why he’d been picking awful gigs in the past years.
Nicolas Cage is, without a doubt, one of the most famous and recognizable actors in the world, but his career is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, many fans remember him for his earlier performances, but on the other hand, there has been a very noticeable decline in the quality of his movies in the past two and a half decades.
Of course, this caught everyone’s attention, not just the viewers’ — and in 1998, Sean Penn, Cage’s former co-star, told The New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he's more like a… performer.” Penn’s words didn’t go unnoticed, and many people considered them to be an insult.
Because they surely sound like an insult, don’t they?
Seven years later, in 2005, Nicolas Cage spoke to Total Film and addressed his ex-colleague’s words. Admittedly, he held no grudges despite the insult.
“That was his opinion and, you know, we’ve since left it all behind us. But I think any time an actor does something unusual it’s going to be met with a certain amount of criticism. I’ve actively searched for that,” Cage shared.
The actor revealed that at some point, he just stopped searching anyone’s approval — either critics’ or the audience’s. Like his movies, his priorities changed entirely.
“What’s the point in just getting good reviews? At the end of the day, I want people to go, ‘Well, what the hell was that?’,” Cage explained and went on to quote Bill Murray’s character from Tootsie saying the same thing.
Nicolas Cage’s experiments definitely resulted in his popularity declining, but that doesn’t matter as long as the actor is happy with himself. After all, Cage’d already done enough for us to love him, and even many of his objectively bad movies have their own fans — try telling 25-year-olds that Ghost Rider was a terrible movie and see what happens!
Anyway, when it comes to Cage’s true goals — which turned out to be rather unexpected — he totally achieved them. Anyone who takes a look at his latest filmography asks themselves, what even are all those movies… and apparently, this was the actor’s ultimate goal. Better yet, if the viewers say the same after watching them.
Sources: The New York Times, Total Film