Nicolas Cage Reddit AMA reveals his favorite lesser-known role

Nicolas Cage’s favorite cult film role is one he did for free.

The Oscar winner revealed during a Reddit AMA with Renfield co-star Nicholas Hoult that his favorite role among his most underrated roles is a small cameo in 1989’s Never on Tuesday.

Cage was asked by a fan what his “favorite lesser-known act from your filmography” was, to which Cage replied, “There was a little cameo of mine that lasted about a minute in a movie called Never on Tuesday .’ I don’t recommend the whole movie. But it was an achievement I made.”

Written and directed by Adam Rifkin, the indie film starred Andrew Lauer, Pete Berg and Claudia Christian as a trio with car problems. The film was direct-to-video and was produced by Cassian Elwes.

The ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ star added, “I wasn’t paid, but an agreement was reached with the director and those who financed the film that if I did it, they would let me do whatever I wanted. So it was a complete avant-garde experiment, and of course I played a character with a prosthetic nose that was very long and pointed. And I had this whole concept from this guy who had a very long nose and had trouble meeting girls, so his dad bought him a Ferrari Testarossa to help him with that. So I showed up on set with a prosthetic nose and a very high pitched voice in a Ferrari Testarossa and of course that was very frustrating for all the other actors.”

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Cage admitted, “They seem to like it now, but back then it was like you can’t really fire me because that was the deal. They said I could do whatever I wanted and he did, and that’s my favorite lesser-known act.”

Hoult asked, “But wait, did you bring the Ferrari yourself?”

Cage replied during the Q&A, “No, it was someone’s Ferrari and they took it from me because I was speeding it.”

Hoult added, “What were you inspired by?” Cage confirmed, “Just kind of a restless live-action version of ‘Pinocchio.'”

When later asked what his “toughest challenge” on screen had been to date, Cage admitted that playing himself in “The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent” was a daunting task.

“There’s not a muscle in my body telling me to play myself in a movie, and I wanted them to cast someone else,” Cage said.

‘Never on Tuesday’ director Rifkin told Entertainment Weekly in 2019, amid the cult film’s resurgence, that Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Cary Elwes, Judd Nelson and Gilbert Gottfried each came on set for a day to create a “crazy character.” play and then left. Cage was specifically given “a free hand to do whatever he wanted,” which was the “reserve” on his contract.

“So he came up with a big rubber nose that he wanted to put on and he wanted to play this crazy character, which we thought was hilarious,” Rifkin recalled. “Now there’s an unabridged version of his scene that needs to be dug up somewhere where he’s saying way crazier things. Unfortunately, that’s not the version that ended up in the last film. But now I wish we could find it because it’s really, really bizarre. But that’s the story of how his character ended up in the movie and became such a weird character.”

And Never on Tuesday isn’t the only role Cage hasn’t been paid for. Leaving Las Vegas writer-director Mike Figgis claimed that both he and lead actor Cage “were never paid.” Cage won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the 1995 film. “They said the film was never profitable,” Figgis told The Hollywood Reporter of the Lumiere Pictures production company, which financed the film.

Figgis concluded: “Whatever. I mean, my career picked up speed again, and the next film I did, I got paid really well. And that within a year [Nicolas Cage] made $20 million a movie, so that was pretty good.”

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