>David Marchese writes: I’m just going to lay my cards out on the table: I believe Nicolas Cage is a truly special artist and the most original actor since Marlon Brando. It’s not only that he’s capable of delivering beautifully naturalistic performances, like in “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), for which he won an Oscar for best actor, or that he has credibly jumped between romantic comedies like “Moonstruck” (1987), action movies like “The Rock” (1996) and unclassifiable films like “Adaptation” (2002). It’s that he brings a distinctly postmodern, wildly imaginative and thrillingly risky approach to all of it. This fall he’ll be playing the title role in David O. Russell’s “Madden,” about the iconic N.F.L. coach John Madden. Cage’s outsize style — which has led to his work being frequently memed — also pulls in references from other films, painting and music, both highbrow and lowbrow, and has taken acting far beyond limited notions of verisimilitude or even, frankly, traditional judgments of good or bad.
>The same devotion to originality shows up in his life offscreen, too. Cage, who is 62 and whom I previously interviewed in 2019, is, to be fair, a bona fide eccentric. His idiosyncratic interests, lavish spending habits and free-spirited nature are, in their own way, as legendary as his highly distinctive performances and at times have threatened to overshadow his groundbreaking artistic legacy. (I’m far more interested in the latter, but the former is still pretty intriguing!)
>What else can I say, other than there’s no one like him. The latest evidence is the new series “Spider-Noir,” based on a Marvel comic and available to watch in either color or sumptuous black and white. The show, premiering in the United States on MGM+ on May 25 and globally on Prime Video on May 27, is Cage’s first big foray into TV, and in it he plays Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled private investigator in 1930s New York who also happens to be a web-slinging superhero. The resulting mash-up, like so much of this interview, is gloriously weird, and perfectly Cage.
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