“Maybe three or four more lead roles,” says Nicolas Cage as he clarifies his eventual plan to quit movies: more on his words this way.
It was late last year when Nicolas Cage announced that he only had “three or four movies left in him”, signalling that his time making films (which stretches all the way back to a brief appearance in 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High) was almost over.
As we reported here, Cage finally got around to watching Breaking Bad and was so taken with Bryan Cranston’s lead role in that series that his head was alive to the possibility of acting in other media beyond cinema.
“I feel I’ve pretty much said what I’ve had to say with cinema,” said Cage at the time. “And I’d like to leave on a high note and say, ‘Adios.’ I think I have to do maybe three or four more movies before I can get there, and then hopefully switch formats and go into some other way of expressing my acting.”
Those three or four movies came quickly as well, as they tend to do with Cage. He’s an actor who likes to keep himself busy and with the release of the incoming serial killer flick Longlegs, Nicolas Cage will have released four films since his surprise retirement announcement.
As well as Longlegs, there’s The Surfer – which is yet to get a wide release – Arcadian, and the aptly-named The Retirement Plan. So is Cage done and can we expect to see him popping up on a long-form TV drama instead?
Not quite, thankfully. The actor has clarified his comments to The New Yorker whilst promoting Longlegs (see our review here) and had this to say:
“Well, I did two or three very supporting roles. So maybe three or four more lead roles. Maybe that’s more of what I was saying,”
“It would have been a slippery slope. I think it could have lapsed into something almost too ridiculous. You don’t want to see that the shark is made of rubber, you know? You want the shark to be terrifying and keep it under the water for a lot of it.”
Hopefully, Nicolas Cage’s movie retirement continues to pile on caveat after caveat so we continue to see him on our screens for years to come. He’s an actor that has zigged and zagged between incredibly different phases in his career and we’re always keen to see where his craft will take him next.
One of those leading roles is set to be a feature-length, live-action take on Spider-Man: Noir, although hopefully there’s a caveat for that film too. We’ll bring you more on Cage’s future plans when he actually decides what they are. If he ever does, that is.
