Nicolas Cage has played vampires, criminals, action heroes, deranged killers and even… himself. SO naturally, the actor says the one thing he refuses to do is get stuck in a box.
While promoting Spider-Noir in New York, Cage reflected on his long, wonderfully unpredictable career – including the superhero role he almost took years before Marvel movies became Hollywood oxygen.
“Villain? I’ve played plenty of villains. I like both,” Cage said. “I think they’re both important parts of cinema. I would not want to get trapped into doing one thing.”
Turns out, Cage once discussed playing Green Goblin with Sam Raimi during the early Spider-Man era, but ultimately passed on the role to star in Adaptation instead – a decision that later earned him an Oscar nomination.
“I decided to do another movie,” Cage explained, calling Adaptation “a much smaller noir of sorts.”
The Green Goblin role famously went to Willem Dafoe, while Tobey Maguire became Spider-Man. Honestly, somewhere n the multiverse, Cage is absolutely hanging upside down from a ceiling monologuing at Peter Parker.
Now he finally gets his own Spider-world in Spider-Noir, where he plays a trench coat wearing private investigator with spidey powers in 1930s New York.
And because this is Nicolas Cage, his acting inspiration somehow combines Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny. “70 percent Bogart, and 30 percent Bugs Bunny,” he told Esquire.
Frankly, that sentence alone deserves an Emmy nomination.
2026-05-24 10:13:00
