Nicolas Cage talks Dog Eat Dog, tomb raiding and Terry Wogan

“My life is regular,” Nicolas Cage tells Empire in our latest issue. “I have exciting moments. But there are far more days that are mundane and gentle and quiet.” Forgive us if ‘gentle’ and ‘quiet’ aren’t the first words that spring to mind when thinking of Nicolas Cage – especially when his National Treasure co-star Justin Bartha describes one particular schnapps-fuelled dinner akin to “a rock ‘n’ roll voodoo ceremony with a hilarious vampire wearing an orange crocodile jacket… and your skull’s on fire.”

Cage’s career has been full of unorthodox method moments – pulling teeth out for 1984’s Birdy, insisting on speaking like the claymation horse from The Gumby Show during the Peggy Sue Got Married shoot, and breaking into a New Orleans cemetery to show his Ghost Rider directors a tomb. His own tomb.

"I remember it was after hours," he recalls. "You can't do that anymore: the whole thing is sealed off now.|

Away from his bug eating antics, Cage put in a memorable performance on Wogan back in 1990{ =nofollow}. “I’m proud of that now, in retrospect. I knew it was taking a chance, but heck, I was promoting a movie called Wild At Heart, so I thought I had to live the part. It was totally spontaneous: I was just riffing, feeling the energy in the audience and being as playful and punk-rock as I possibly could. I don’t think Mr Wogan was too amused, but I think later, as his career continued to be as illustrious as it was, he was kind of proud of it too.”

Next month’s Dog Eat Dog sees Cage reunite with director Paul Schrader for a crime thriller in which he steals a baby (again), impersonates Humphrey Bogart, and punches an officer of the law repeatedly in slow-motion. In short, it sounds like the perfect Cage vehicle: “we wanted to reflect the way culture has been going – YouTube, short attention spans, Tarantino’s impact – and make a movie with the ethos, ‘Don’t do anything boring. Keep it entertaining. Keep it moving.’” Boring Cage ain’t.

For the full interview, be sure to pick up a copy of our latest issue, in all good and evil newsagents now. To subscribe, just head this way{ =nofollow}.

Dog Eat Dog is released on 11 November.