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Nicolas Cage is no stranger to delivering over-the-top performances, and one of his most memorable came in the 1997 action thriller “Face/Off”.
In a new interview with the “Variety Award Circuit” podcast, as reported by Entertainment Weekly, Cage looks back at the movie, in which he plays terrorist Castor Troy, who undergoes face-swapping surgery with Sean Archer, a cop seeking revenge after Castor killed his young son.
“That movie was an interesting example of independent attitude and big-studio filmmaking,” Cage explained. “The fact that it worked, that it landed, and the public loved it, I was like, ‘Okay, see, this is why we gotta make both. We can’t give up on the independent movie.’”
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According to Cage, he “cherry-picked” elements of his outlandish performance in 1989 cult horror-comedy “Vampire’s Kiss” to utilize in the “enormous budget studio movie.”
This, he admitted, led to “some phone calls,” including one from producer Steven Reuther, who asked Cage to be “more concise” with his performance in one particular scene.
“That was the scene in the jail cell where — god, it’s such a trippy movie — where Sean Archer is pretending he’s Castor Troy and so it was so … cubist,” he explained. “And I remember I was like, ‘I’m Castor Troy!’ And it went on and on, almost like a riot.”
As Cage recalled, he “just kept going for it” — with the full support of director John Woo.
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However, even Cage admitted he may have pushed things a little to close to the edge.
“There was a moment in there where I think I actually left my body,” Cage said. “I got scared, am I acting or is this real? I can see it if I look at the movie, that one moment, it’s in my eyes.”