Nicolas Cage tells Marilyn Manson about quitting gambling, owning a talking crow
Nicolas Cage is a perpetual story-generating machine. Even outside of the analysis that surrounds every acting choice made throughout his staggering filmography, Cage himself lives a life where every new day seems to bring him into strange situations the rest of us can only hope to encounter once in a lifetime. The latest example of this comes from Interview, which recently published Cage and his bud Marilyn Manson chatting about all sorts of stuff—including the time Cage won so much money at roulette that he helped fund a Bahamian orphanage and then quit gambling forever.
Throughout the interview, Manson and Cage discuss alchemy, magic numbers, and the fact that Cage lives in Vegas. In response to being asked if he gambles, Cage describes turning “$200 into $20,000" in the course of 20 minutes at a casino in the Bahamas (the secret to his win, of course, is that Cage has “tremendous confidence”) before giving that money to an orphanage. He “never gambled again” after this, he says, because doing so “would ruin the power of that moment.”
The interview is full of other fascinating exchanges, like Cage telling Manson that he “just bought a crow” and named it “Huginn, after one of [the Norse god] Odin’s two ravens ….” Huginn The Crow, Cage says, “started laughing and called me an asshole” one morning. When Manson asks if the actor thinks the bird is “genuinely speaking to you,” Cage says that he does, and that Huginn also “has a sense of humor” and called him “asshole” the way friends would if they were joking around with each other. Manson and Cage then discuss the time Cage recorded “a multi-universe of several different characters screaming ‘cock’ in … a loud and dissonant way” as part of some kind of lockdown project about a family Cage dreamed up.
Read the entire interview for more on all of the above, plus thoughts on how magic works or the time Werner Herzog visited Cage’s haunted New Orleans mansion and tried to convince him to put his pet two-headed snake in the Bad Lieutenant sequel.
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