Nicolas Cage Made Himself a Legend. Then He Had to Live With It.
5/23/20261 hr 2 min
The iconic actor on his thrillingly risky choices, on screen and off, and becoming a meme.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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David Marchese· Host0:25
[instrumental music playing] From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. I'm just gonna lay my cards out on the table. I think Nicolas Cage is a truly special artist and the most original and unique actor since Marlon Brando. It's not just that he's capable of delivering beautifully naturalistic performances, like in Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar, or that he's jumped between romantic comedies like Moonstruck, action movies like The Rock, and unclassifiable films like Adaptation. It's that he brings a postmodern, highly imaginative, and thrillingly risky approach to all of it. That style, which has led to his work frequently being memed on social media, also pulls from other films, music, and painting, and I think it takes acting far beyond realism or even, frankly, traditional judgments of good or bad. The same devotion to originality shows up in his off-screen life, too. Cage, whom I previously interviewed back in