Cage: “There was some yogurt. There
wasn’t hot yogurt, and I think I was administering the yogurt to myself.”
Marchese:
“But why?”
Cage: “I don’t really remember.”
Marchese: “It’s better that you don’t.”
Cage: “Probably.”— Oscar-winning
American film actor Nicolas Cage, interviewed by David Marchese, “Nicolas Cage
Made Himself A Legend. Then He Had to Live With It,” The New York Times
Magazine, May 31, 2026
Well, I’m
glad we got that squared away. I think.
Faithful
reader, do you recall perhaps the most bizarre interview ever conducted on
David Letterman’s Late Show? Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix
made the late-night host uncomfortable with his long hair, unkempt beard, and
gaseous musings—until admitting a year later that it was all staged for a mock
documentary.
I wonder if the same phenomenon is going on—and has been for years—with Nicolas Cage. Stories like the one above are only marginally less nutty than the ones retailed for years about him (including that the urban legend that the actor actually is a vampire).
Did the actor, bored by
what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery,” decide to have a little
fun with his interviewer?
It
wouldn’t be the first time that a celebrity spun a few fables for an
all-too-credulous reporter or talk-show host. Bob Dylan was famous for that. The
late director David Lynch and Twilight star Robert Pattinson were also known to have
invented a tale or two.
Cage
didn’t stop with that little yogurt yarn.
He
disputed that he’d taken an aquarium from the Museum of Modern Art (actually,
he says, it was a Lucite box that covers artifacts, and he had “used it as an
enclosure for a king snake”).
And he
acknowledged having jumped as many as four beer kegs in his childhood, and of
even planning a “hoop of fire” around the whole until a sensible adult came and
took it away.
Please—enough
already! Nobody can be this crazy. It’s all a put-on—right?
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