From Normal to Nic: Nicolas Cage performances ranked in order of weirdness

Cage’s first big lead role remains his most conventional. In , he plays Randy, a brooding Hollywood kid who finds himself at a party in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley where he becomes smitten with Julie (Deborah Foreman), who’s having issues with her shallow boyfriend, Tommy. Loosely based on Romeo And Juliet but minus the body count, it’s a slightly gritty teen romance that allows Cage to smolder as the not-too-bad boy who cuts to the chase and through the pretenses of the well-off. The musical remake of a few years ago suggested that Julie and Randy would certainly have broken up eventually, probably because Cage couldn’t keep up the facade of a stereotypical teen heartthrob for long.

Cage doesn’t show up until around the 26-minute mark of the Oscar-winning , but when he does, it’s an injection of raw, animalistic emotion into the midst of overwhelmingly shticky in-law sitcom antics. Playing the more savage brother of Danny Aiello’s uncharacteristically nerdy Johnny, Cage’s Ronny sweeps Cher’s Loretta off her feet by channeling Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, as every aspiring method actor must at some point. It’s hard to imagine Loretta and Ronny lasting particularly long as a couple, but the latter’s mix of violently assertiveness and opera-loving sensitivity made him an ‘80s dream date.

Loosely riffing on , imagines Cage as Jack, a Wall Street tycoon who remains single and wonders about Kate (Tea Leoni), the one who got away. When holiday magic intervenes, he wakes up in a different life as a tire salesman, married to Kate with kids. But while movies like would have the protagonist choose the simple life with family over success, director Brett Ratner doesn’t play that, and in the end, he lets Cage have back his old life and Kate. Somehow Cage pulls off this spoiled, best-of-both-worlds ending without being as hateable as his director.

In , another installment of Nicolas Cage subverting tropes, he plays a frequently harassed TV weatherman, whose personal life is in shambles, with an estranged wife and kids, and a hectoring, righteous father. Pulling himself together he … manages to do slightly better. His father dies, and his wife remarries, but he gets a slightly better job, improves things a little with his kids, and he carries a bow and arrow to deter harassers. It’s like an inverse Family Man, with realistic expectations.

Cage uses his manic energy as epic misdirection in , looking like the world’s awesomest party dude as he fills up a shopping cart full of booze. The movie’s mood plummets after that, as he plays a failed screenwriter determined to drink himself to death. Striking up a friendship with a prostitute named Sera (Elisabeth Shue), they enter a non-judgmental relationship in which she may never ask him to quit drinking and he can never judge her hooking, and both find it harder than they imagined. The darker implication is that many of Cage’s other characters might be like this when we’re not looking.

In , Cage defies tropes yet again, playing a reclusive former chef whose beloved truffle-hunting pig is stolen, so he goes to the big city seeking his own personal form of restorative justice. A stint at an underground fight club initially misdirects the viewer with violent anticipation; then the story turns sadder and more sensitive, as his culinary skills and their ability to conjure sense-memory become his primary weapons. Nobody wins, but there’s the smallest sense that everyone comes out a little bit wiser. And viewers come out seeing one of Cage’s all-time great performances.

may have been a major action breakthrough for Cage, but it also seemed tailored to his persona, as a regular guy who has occasional outbursts. isn’t a better movie, but it’s a more insane Cage, given a Fabio-esque wig, an affected accent, and a stuffed bunny to protect. While his jacked-up physique proved he could have looked like a convincing Superman—his dream at the time—his odd character choices for the A-list actioner showed that while you can take the actor out of the weirdness …

Cage frequently channels Elvis, but probably never better or more formatively than in David Lynch’s twisted road movie (very) loosely based on . Normally, playing the romantic hero in a movie also featuring Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossellini, and Crispin Glover might be a recipe for relative invisibility. Not for Cage. With his now-signature snakeskin jacket, ever-shifting moral compass, Elvis-crooning, and smoking-hot chemistry with Laura Dern, he purloins the movie back from the hordes of notorious scene-stealers, and sets a precedent for future movies like that would forever associate him with the King.

screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s inability to directly translate Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book to the screen proved acting gold for Cage. He plays both Kaufman, a shy, socially inept screenwriter struggling with writer’s block, and Kaufman’s completely fictional brother Donald, a supremely confident screenwriting noob who instantly grasps Hollywood formula. The movie itself becomes a battle of tones between Charlie and Donald, and the perfect venue for its star to play both manic and depressive, opposite himself.

Normal Nic and Crazy Cage share the screen in , a self-referential tale of a Cage superfan (Pedro Pascal) who hires him to appear at a birthday party. Cage plays both himself and the hallucinated younger idea of himself, and when Pascal’s Javi suggests they write a script together, it becomes a parody of Adaptation, as the U.S. Government and drug dealers become involved, and life imitates art. Cage embraces every audience perception of him, and subsequently inspired his first TikTok memes based on the moment he succumbs to the charms of .

Cage rarely sounds more relaxed than when he’s doing cartoons, perhaps because they allow him to imagine a stranger reality than may be apparent on a typical set. Animated features have allowed him to be a caveman patriarch, a film noir version of Spider-Man, and even Superman, the role he craved in live-action but never realized. It’s hard to pick one that’s better than the others, but they all manage to make fantastical characters feel grounded, keeping one foot in reality while the other’s in, well, whatever he and the animators conjure up. That’s a fine line he often leaps over in live-action.

Cage has played the action hero role many times, but only once has he played John Travolta as the action hero. In , a movie that frequently tops lists of favorite Cage flicks, Travolta’s hero cop Sean Archer and Cage’s arch-villain Castor Troy literally trade faces, and spend the whole rest of the movie impersonating each other while firing many guns. Hong Kong action master-director John Woo finally found the two stars best equipped to handle his balance of the absurd and the operatic sides of onscreen carnage, and fans have been clamoring for a sequel ever since.

Prior to 2007’s , Cage had been attached to numerous superhero projects for years, to the point that it became a running joke in Wizard magazine. When he finally got one, it was a weird, semi-watered down take on the cursed biker with a flaming head. For the 2012 sequel,  co-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor tried to up the insanity with 3D, Ghost Rider pissing fire, and Cage actually wearing skull face paint on set to get into character as the demonic spirit of vengeance. The film’s a mess, but Cage makes it a glorious one.

Dressed as Michael Keaton’s Batman but adopting Adam West’s vocal cadences while being way more violent than either, Cage adds a whole new Bat-dimension to Mark Millar’s Big Daddy, a hugely irresponsible ex-cop who trains his 11-year-old daughter (Chloe Moretz, in her star-making performance) to be the ultimate killing machine. Appropriately for Cage’s lifelong comics fandom, was sold to Lionsgate based on the enthusiastic response to the first trailer at Comic-Con. The Cage-less sequel didn’t do so well, when his sort-of replacement Jim Carrey got instant buyer’s remorse about the onscreen carnage.

Critics like to get judgy about this remake by Neil LaBute, but the 1973 original was weirdly campy too, with its hippy-dippy singing, Christopher Lee in a kilt, and Edward Woodward as the world’s oldest virgin. LaBute, whose work often evinces sheer terror at male-female power imbalances in relationships, unsurprisingly makes the villains a matriarchal pagan society who sacrifice men in hopes of a divine blessing for their honey harvest. Cage goes loudly blundering in in search of his ex’s daughter, and eventually gets choked with live bees—which became one of the quintessential images representing peak Cage weirdness—and burned alive for his troubles. Being set on fire is kind of his thing, as we’ll see again …

Not enough people have seen this gem, a highlight of Cage’s direct-to-video-ish sub-career, in which he plays Joe, a trucker who falls for the sexual charms of Julie (Franka Potente), a woman who can contact the dead but only when she’s being choked into near-death. Julie wants to bring her comatose daughter back from the brink, but instead, Joe’s evil, dead wife Mary possesses the young girl’s body, seduces Joe, and they plan to run away together until Joe learns Mary killed their daughter. He’s so upset that he sets himself on fire, as you do when you’re Nicolas Cage being taunted by ghosts.

Cage doesn’t say a word in this unofficial knock-off of the Five Nights At Freddy’s video games, but he doesn’t stay silent either, grunting and screaming and sucking down energy drinks in his role as a possibly supernatural avenger who spends the night at a theme restaurant full of killer animatronics possessed by the souls of cannibal serial killers. They’ve been accepting sacrifices from the locals, but prove no match for Cage wielding a mop. Honestly, what can?

Prior to , this was as close as Cage came to playing a Universal monster. Hunching his back, slurring his speech, and talking to animals in hallucinations, his drug-addled “hero” cop McDonagh is grotesque inside and out. A monstrous human being who shuffles around like a classic monster, he destroys everything and everyone around him, yet somehow gets a sort of happily-ever-after family ending … albeit one where he’s still on heroin. Director Werner Herzog is nobody’s sentimentalist, but he does love a good bit of cosmic irony. For any other actor, this would be their craziest performance ever, but this is Cage we’re talking about, so there’s one more…

More people probably know by reputation than have actually seen it. It’s the one where Cage eats a live cockroach on camera, and screams the entire alphabet. What doesn’t come across in YouTube montages is the insanely fake English-ish accent he adopts for the whole movie, as the world’s most abusive and misogynist boss who becomes convinced he’s become a literal bloodsucker. If it were anyone else in this role—and it nearly was Dennis Quaid—it’s a movie that most likely would feel repugnant. Because it’s Cage firing on maximum insanity cylinders, however, it’s one that’s (correctly) sought out and sits (justifiably) at the glorious apex of Nicolas Cage weirdness.