When you think of the career of Nicolas Cage, you may think of his Academy Award-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas, or his Oscar-nominated Adaptation, classics like It Could Happen to You, Moonstruck, or Matchstick Men, his action movies like The Rock, Face/Off, or Con-Air, his comedies like Raising Arizona, Honeymoon In Vegas, or The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. He’s also had some far-out roles in the past few years like Color Out of Space, Pig, Mandy and Willy’s Wonderland. Whatever your mood, you can likely find a Nicolas Cage movie to match it.
But while recently speaking to Empire for their Greatest Actors issue, Cage talked about the one kind of role he still has one his bucket list:
“I haven’t done a musical yet. I’d like to try that. I’m not much of a singer. I did sing okay in Wild At Heart, I thought, but I’ve since blown my voice out singing ‘Purple Rain’ incorrectly in karaoke bars.” If there is a musical role he could pick? “I think I’d make a good Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar.”
While Cage hasn’t yet taken on a musical, he has imbued his performances with all kinds of inspirations from other art forms. He explained:
“When I did Ghost Rider I was thinking about Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I tried to get the transformation scene to go right there [puts his hands on his cheeks and contorts his face into an eerie impression of the masterpiece]. In Wild At Heart I was trying to approximate what it felt like to see Warhol’s marvellous collages of Elvis Presley as a cowboy with a six-shooter. I wanted to see if you could do that with film performance. Plus, I think if David Lynch could cast anyone in any of his movies he would have wanted to have cast Elvis, so I think he was excited to roll with it when I suggested it.”
Cage certainly is one of a kind. I don’t know that he’d give a Broadway-worthy performance, but I kind of just want him to do whatever he wants to do, because he always puts his whole heart into every movie he makes.
What do you think? Would you like to see Nic Cage star in Jesus Christ Superstar?
This content was originally published here.
