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Nicolas Cage plays a celebrity chef who abandons his career to live in the woods with a pig in the new movie Pig, and the actor himself has gone on a journey into his own version of wilderness.
Speaking to Variety, Cage said that like his Pig character Rob, he’s unsure if he’ll ever return to his past life. For Cage, this would be making the types of big blockbuster movies he made earlier in his career.
“I do feel that I’ve gone into my own wilderness and that I’ve left the small town that is Hollywood,” he said. “I don’t know exactly why Rob left his stardom. It’s never fully explained, and I like that about the movie. But as for me, I don’t know if I’d want to go back. I don’t know if I’d want to go and make another Disney movie. It would be terrifying. It’s a whole different climate. There’s a lot of fear there.”
That’s too bad for people hoping to see Cage return to the National Treasure series, which is set to return as a TV show. Cage remarked that it was a “high pressure game” to make The Rock and Con Air with Jerry Bruckheimer back-to-back in the ’90s. Nowadays, he’s more excited by the independent film projects he’s involved with, like Mandy, Joe, and now Pig.
“When I was making Jerry Bruckheimer movies back-to-back, that was just a high pressure game. There were a lot of fun moments, but at the same time, there was also, ‘We wrote this line. It has to be said this way,'” Cage said. “They’d put a camera on you and photograph you, and order you: ‘Now say the roller skate training wheels line.’ I’d say, ‘I’ll do that but I’d also like to try it this way.’ On independent movies, you have more freedom to experiment and be fluid. There’s less pressure and there’s more oxygen in the room.”
Pig is playing now in theaters. Cage’s next movie will be The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which he plays a fictional version of himself in a wild-sounding story. Cage will never watch the movie.
