Nicolas Cage Reveals He Doesn’t Like Being Called “An Actor”, Here’s Why

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Nicolas Cage starred in three movies that were released in 2021 — Pig, Willy’s Wonderland, and Prisoners of the Ghostland. In the most recent movie Pig, Cage played Rob, a former chef-turned-truffle hunter who seeks the person for which he believes stole his titular animal.

Cage recently spoke on Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast about his career, and one of the things he said is that he doesn’t like being called an actor. Why? Because for him, being a good actor means being a good liar. Cage also revealed which words he prefers over the word “actor”.

“For me it always implies, ‘Oh, he’s a great actor, therefore he’s a great liar.’ So with the risk of sounding like a pretentious a**hole, I like the word ‘thespian’ because thespian means you’re going into your heart, or you’re going into your imagination, or your memories or your dreams, and you’re bringing something back to communicate with the audience.” — Nicolas Cage for Variety

57-year-old thespian also revealed how is he picking the roles he’s going to play — by avoiding expectations.

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“It was my aunt Talia Shire who first said to me, ‘Naturalism is a style.’ And I was also a big believer in arts synchronicity, and that what you could do with one art form you could do and another meaning. You know, in painting, for example, you can get abstract, you can get photorealistic, you can get impressionistic, why not try that with film performance?”

In 2022, we’re set to watch Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Retirement Plan, and The Old Way.

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Lukas Abramovich is a freelance writer and photo and video editor based in Croatia. He's also a web designer and holds a Master’s degree in general Computer Science from the Faculty of Informatics based in Pula, Croatia. Since 2018, Lukas has worked on several portals writing about movies, TV shows, and video games. He's currently writing articles for two of them: Fiction Horizon and Comic Basics. He also has a YouTube channel in his native language, and the content there is mostly reviewing popular movies and TV shows. Lukas also has an Instagram page where he once used to post fan-made posters he made, which is something he would like to continue working on, as photo and video editing are also some of his passions. Lukas is a big movie lover who is okay with watching any kind of movie. His favorite movie is Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, but he's a loyal follower of Marvel and DC movies, as well as several other blockbuster franchises he's been following for years; Star Wars, Fast & Furious, Mission: Impossible, and James Cameron's Avatar are only some of them. His favorite director is Christopher Nolan, with Quentin Tarantino and Denis Villeneuve as honorable mentions. Lukas is also a big fan of four fantasy multimedia franchises; The Wizarding World, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher, and The Lord of the Rings. He calls them "the four rulers of the fantasy genre." He loves to write about anything spawned from those franchises (books, games, movies...), as well as anything branded with the Marvel or DC logo. Video games and their adaptations are also something he follows faithfully since he's a big fan of story-driven single-player games like Assassin's Creed, The Last of Us, Uncharted, etc. His favorite video game ever is Red Dead Redemption 2.