Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage is an American actor and producer with an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe, plus two BAFTA nominations. Films he has appeared in have grossed over $6.4 billion, and his work across an unusually wide spread of genres has earned him a large cult following.

What separates him from other stars of his generation is that he treats naturalism as one option among several, and frequently declines it. He will play a scene at a pitch nobody asked for, and often he is right. H.I. in Raising Arizona is a cartoon with real longing inside it. Sailor in Wild at Heart is an Elvis impression carrying a knife. Castor Troy in Face/Off is a man doing an impression of the actor playing him, which is either the silliest or the most sophisticated idea in 1990s action cinema. Then Leaving Las Vegas takes the opposite route, strips out every piece of technique and wins him the Academy Award for Best Actor, and Adaptation asks him to play two brothers who differ only in confidence.

The middle years turned him into an action lead in The Rock, Con Air, Gone in Sixty Seconds and the National Treasure films, then into a very high volume of low-budget work. The late reinvention is real and worth taking seriously. Pig is quiet and grief-stricken and almost entirely still. Mandy is a hallucination. Dream Scenario is a comedy about becoming a meme. Longlegs is unsettling in a way that depends on him being unreadable. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent lets him play himself, which by that point was a genre of its own.