Nicolas Cage addresses his acting retirement timetable and clarifies his comments about his future in Hollywood.
In an interview from 2023, Cage said he was “starting to cement” his plan about his acting retirement, telling Vanity Fair, “I may have three or four more movies left in me.”
“I do feel I’ve said what I’ve had to say with cinema,” he added. “I think I took film performance as far as I could.”
However, in a new interview with The New Yorker, the Longlegs actor was asked about the timetable of his retirement plan and took the opportunity to clear things up.
“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,” he said, adding that he considered his role in Longlegs as supporting.
Cage explained, “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.”
In the same interview, Cage was asked what movie he would recommend to someone who was unfamiliar with his work citing the film Pig.
Pig is a 2021 drama directed and written by Michael Sarnoski. Cage stars as a truffle hunter living in Oregon who has to return to Portland to look for his beloved foraging pig after being kidnapped.
“Tt’s something that I think people can get something out of, because tragedy is going to hit all of us at some point. It’s just a matter of when,” he said. “It’s also a movie that to me is like a folk song. It’s a very quiet, gentle movie, which is the opposite of what we started our conversation with—people thinking I’m crazy.”