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Nicolas Cage

Five things you probably didn’t know about Nicolas Cage

From his famous uncle to tripping with a feline friend, there’s more to the ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ star than you might have thought

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Born Nicolas Coppola, he got sick of being teased that he only had a career because of his surname (thanks to uncle Francis Ford). So he changed it to Cage after Marvel superhero Luke Cage. Well, it’s better than Thor.
In 2007, Cage paid $276,000 for a dinosaur skull, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio. Excessive? This is a man who once owned nine Rolls Royces.

Before you call the RSPCA, no coercion was involved. Cage’s cat Lewis stole the ’shrooms out the fridge. ‘He ate them voraciously. It was like cat-nip to him,’ Cage told David Letterman. ‘I thought: What the heck, I better do it with him.’

It worked for a 20-year-old student from Canada. In 2012 she did a mega oopsie, attaching a picture of Cage looking demented to a job application instead of her CV. Within 24 hours she had two job offers.

Everyone loves Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit on YouTube. But it takes work. He ate a live cockroach for ‘Vampire’s Kiss’, had four teeth removed for ‘Birdy’ and in his new film ‘Joe’ insisted on a close-up with a real venomous snake rather than a rubber body-double. Respect.

Watch the ‘Joe’ trailer

Read ‘Joe’ review

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Film
  • Drama

David Gordon Green captures the beauty of the landscape even as he populates it with people on their uppers (many of them played by real locals). The movie is its best in these seemingly improvised side vignettes (there’s a particularly memorable one in which Joe shows a guy how to properly skin a deer). Yet Green, as is his wont, too often strains for poetic effect with a flowery voiceover and tone-deaf interactions that undercut the genuineness.

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