It makes you think whether it’s an extended period of time as a celebrity – maybe because it happens at a really young age – that makes them the most oddball weirdest individuals in American culture, or if it’s just being an actor in general.
Of course what usually happens is that these actors become so self-absorbed, self-righteous and downright delusional, that the rest of us have to keep them at arms length even if we recognize their talent.
And this viral interview with Nicolas Cage proves he’s lost his dang mind.
Nicolas Cage has one of the most interesting careers in Hollywood history. The nephew of filmmaking legend Francis Ford Coppola, Cage stormed onto the scene with starring roles in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Raising Arizona” and” Moonstruck.”
Cage was on his way to be one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood in the late 1980s. He had a series of movies that weren’t great in the early 1990s like “Fire Birds,” “Amos & Andrew” and “Trapped in Paradise.”
But although most people thought Cage was a “pretty good actor,” he shocked all of Hollywood with his performance as a degenerate screenwriter alcoholic who decides he wants to kill himself by alcohol poisoning in “Leaving Las Vegas,” which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Now he’s going to get all of the best dramatic roles and repeat for best actor category, right?
Nope. Cage took on action roles instead. He followed up his Academy Award winning performance with action movies like “The Rock,” “Con Air” and “Face/Off.” All of them were great. Then he went through his thriller phase with “Snake Eyes,” “8MM” and “Bringing Out the Dead.”
And then he turned in another Academy Award nominated performance in “Adaptation.”
After a string of duds, now he’s largely doing modern day B movies. If there were a definition of a career roller coaster in Hollywood then Nicolas Cage is the epitome of it.
And maybe the reason why he’s done this is because he’s lost his mind a little bit. It’s almost like he can’t separate fiction from reality anymore.
A viral interview with New York Times Magazine, Cage revealed some interesting things about his life.
He once shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a real dinosaur skull but had to return it for legal reasons. When asked about he said, “The dinosaur skull was an unfortunate thing, because I did spend $276,000 on that. I bought it at a legitimate auction and found out it was abducted from Mongolia illegally, and then I had to give it back. Of course it should be awarded to its country of origin. But who knew? Plus, I never got my money back. So that stank.”
And that incident sparked Cage to go on a real-life search for the Holy Grail. Yes, that Holy Grail.
He said, “I started following mythology and I was finding properties that aligned with that. It was almost like ‘National Treasure.’ It’s like when you build a library. You read a book, and in it there’s a reference to another book, and then you buy that book, and then you attach the references. For me it was all about where was the grail? Is it at Glastonbury? Does it exist? Yeah, if you go to Glastonbury and go to the Chalice Well, there’s a spring that does taste like blood. I guess it’s really because there’s a lot of iron in the water. But legend had it that in that place was a grail chalice, or two cruets rather, one of blood and one of sweat. But that led to there being talk that people had come to Rhode Island, and they were looking for something as well.”
Do what now? He does realize he’s an actor, right? Many people throughout history who are far more trained and educated in this area of expertise have tried and failed to find it. It must be that acting ego that deludes himself into believe he’s going to be the one to find it.