How Nicholas Cage Made Longlegs a “Deeply Personal” Role

Say what you volition astir Nicholas Cage, helium ever goes for it successful immoderate movie he’s in. The recently released Longlegs has kept him retired of the movie’s selling successful a nonstop capacity, but slivers of footage and pre-release hype astir his reportedly freaky look person drawn a batch of attention. And successful playing the titular serial slayer targeting families, Cage utilized parts of his ain household past to pass his performance.

Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Cage recalled a infinitesimal from his puerility wherever helium saw his parent Joy Vogelsang putting connected Noxzema acold cream. Being 2 astatine the time, helium remembers seeing her “turn her look truly accelerated and stared astatine maine aft [putting on] the acold cream. The whiteness of [it] conscionable truly spooked me.” In the film, Longlegs has a ghastly achromatic complexion akin to that infinitesimal with Cage’s mother, but without a wide motive. The histrion doesn’t person a circumstantial crushed arsenic for wherefore his quality is truthful white, but noted the “strange connection” betwixt slayer and color. “He says it’s conscionable a unit he’s alert of, and you don’t question it excessively much,” Cage notes. “He knows it erstwhile helium sees it.”

Performance-wise, Cage antecedently called this a “deeply personal” relation owing to his mother’s schizophrenia passim her life. In June, helium told EW astir however she’d speech successful poetic terms, thing helium besides brought into Longlegs. To Cage, the quality is simply a tragic fig due to the fact that he’s “at the mercy of these voices talking to him.” Ahead of shooting successful aboriginal 2023, he’d grounds his show connected his telephone to nail the character’s “rhythms and melodies. […] By the clip I got connected set, it was truthful dialed successful and became astir similar performing a opus oregon a spot of music.”

Cage’s interrogation besides contains Longlegs spoilers, truthful if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t spell past the banner below.

In the film’s climax, Maika Monroe’s Harker yet comes face-to-face with Longlegs, who’s been giving dolls possessed with Satanic vigor to families of girls calved connected circumstantial days. It’s yet revealed that he’d targeted her arsenic a young girl, but was spared acknowledgment to her mother’s intervention. The gathering wherever they “reunite,” and Longlegs’ termination successful beforehand of her, is wherefore Cage joined the movie successful the archetypal place. The 2 actors didn’t socialize anterior to that point–a determination helium believes was intentional from manager Osgood Perkins–and he’d been truly looking guardant to the “explosive” brushwood betwixt their characters.

Turns out, the country has a meta furniture added onto it. Cage professed to being a instrumentality of Monroe and her fearfulness chops successful films similar It Follows and Watcher. Like with immoderate audiences, It Follows was his archetypal clip seeing her, and helium called the movie “one of my favorites successful the genre.” Cheekily, helium besides drew parallels betwixt the adoration for his costar and Longlegs’ years-long obsession with Harker, calling her “a leader of sorts” his quality yet had the pleasance of meeting.

Before that point, the movie goes retired of its mode to not sprout Longlegs directly. Instead, he’s glimpsed done antithetic angles oregon reflections. Perkins explained it arsenic showing however the slayer near specified an content connected Harker arsenic a child, adjacent arsenic she supressed that memory. He’s there, in a sense, said Perkins, but he’s “totally not there, but [also] wholly there.”

From the pre-release buzz, Cage is delivering a beauteous unnerving (complimentary!) show successful Longlegs that’s capable to get folks to spot it successful droves. After seeing him bash truthful galore roles implicit the decades, it’s bully to cognize that helium tin find caller ways to freak radical the hellhole out.

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