A Castle With a Different Cage : He’s 30, a Parent, and Taking a Rest From ‘Twisted Characters’

Nicolas Cage lives in a fabulously fake, unabashedly new old castle--with turrets, yet--at the scenic tip of one of Hollywood’s less ostentatiously chichi hills. “I got a really good price on it,” he offers absurdly. “Nobody wants to live in a castle.”

The living room walls are heavy with maroon brocade; a gigantic stuffed black bug, reputed to have been used in an “Outer Limits” episode, dangles from a corner over his shoulder. Parrots are making wild jungle squawks from another room, and gargoyles are just about everywhere. The man has style. He calls it “Gothic hot-rod.”

And that sounds right. “Would you have expected this from me?” he asks, enjoying the effect of his domain. “Did you see something a little more black lacquer? High tech? Neo-modern?” Lest we think him seriously concerned, he cries out, “Don’t judge me! Don’t judge me!”--then extends the tour to the tiger-print bedroom with the laminated cockroach in the headboard.

At 30, Cage has been letting movie audiences judge him--for nearly half his life. He first appeared on-screen at 17 as the sensitive punk-hunk in “Valley Girl” (1983), emerging shirtless on the beach and mumbling, “Whaaat, I don’t want to go to the Valley. I’m not inthe mood to go to the Valley.”

It may not have been Brando calling “Stella!” but the debut kicked off a prolific and peculiar career full of edgy, often dangerous characters with an unexpected romantic streak and decency trapped behind their eyes. Think Elvis and James Stewart in one long, loopy package, probably with adenoids.

This time, however, he’s positively decency unchained in “It Could Happen to You,” the Andrew Bergman romantic comedy-fable that opens Friday. Cage plays Charlie, a good, old-fashioned beat cop in Queens who, short money for a tip at the neighborhood coffee shop, promises the waitress (Bridget Fonda) half his lottery ticket. Naturally, he wins $4 million and, because “a promise is a promise,” hands $2 million over to her.

“Yes, this is the Jimmy Stewart movie,” Cage agrees, “but I’m such a huge admirer that I’d hesitate to say I was impersonating him. It was really more of a tip of the hat, kind of an homage, you know. I do think he had what seemed to be a pure American innocence, which trembled on the screen in a way that gave people hope. And there isn’t a lot of that right now in movies.”

In fact, Cage had done “so many subversive and twisted characters on the darker side of things” that he himself decided a few years ago to lighten up. “I know this sounds like a cliche and kind of romantic,” he says, “but I’m 30 now and a parent. . . .” (Weston, 3 1/2, mostly lives with his mother, actress Kristina Fulton; Cage, who shares custody, now lives with model Kristen Zang.)

“I suddenly became worried about my community. I don’t want anything to happen to people I love. Even when I was making ‘Wild at Heart’ “--David Lynch’s rhapsodic outlaw sonnet (1990)--”I was still a very sort of rebellious young man. Now I feel myself slowing down into a worrywart about society. . . . Yeah,” he smiles at the adult predicament with a combination of earnestness and irony, “I’m a member of the club now.

“I remember I saw Jim Morrison in an old TV interview once and he was really drugged up on something, but he said, ‘I haven’t done a song yet that has conveyed pure happiness.’ And I looked at him and thought, ‘You know what? You were great, but you hadn’t done that--and you could be really pretentious.’ And then I thought, ‘Am I being pretentious?’ I knew I could be funny, but I didn’t want to be funny. I wanted to be James Dean.”

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The result was what he calls his “sunshine trilogy”--Bergman’s ‘Honeymoon in Vegas,” then “Guarding Tess,” and now this almost mythic style piece. And this trio doesn’t even include his too-honest-to-lie drifter in “Red Rock West,” the noir thriller recently rescued from the video gulag for general release, or his reluctant bank robber at Christmas in the upcoming “It Happened in Paradise,” with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz.

“Nick makes ordinary guys so interesting,” marvels Bergman, who is similarly drawn to everyday characters trapped in extraordinary situations. “There’s nothing white bread about anything he does.”

Maybe it’s the quizzical eyebrows; maybe it’s the wariness lurking behind the seemingly guileless and sleepy eyes. Whatever, even his sunniest characters hint of dark encounters with clouds. “I’ve always felt we have a little bit of good and bad in all of us--and that’s what makes us complicated and all that,” he says. “But Charlie is good, good, good, so I wanted to play him a little larger than life. Naturalism is a style that can be really effective, but it can be really boring.”

And so, clearly, can all that goodness. This is, after all, still the fellow who decorated the castle, who collects muscle cars, who once told American Film, “I’m just more entertained with something that gives you bad dreams.” He is now filming “Kiss of Death,” a remake of the Richard Widmark-Victor Mature gangster flick, in which Cage plays the bad guy to the good guy of David Caruso of “NYPD Blue.”

This explains his new goatee, (“for a more fierce look”), if not the embroidered silk shirt, the rather formal black pants and black alligator shoes that, at first glance, give our host the unexpected air of a Don at his Spanish villa.

“I’ve never thought I was handsome by Hollywood standards,” he says, “but I think, lucky for me, the American public tends to respond more to the Everyman--or Everywoman--than to the dream man or woman. Look at Harrison Ford, who strikes me as a classic Everyman type, very intense but not extraordinarily handsome, you know? Tom Hanks is another good example. Of course, there are the Mel Gibsons, but I think people by and large like to go to movies to feel like they could be these people.”

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This is a man who has grown up in public--essentially self-trained and, although his pedigree is fascinating, self-created. He was born in Long Beach, as Nicolas Coppola, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, and youngest of the three sons of a dancer-choreographer named Joy Vogelsang and a professor of comparative literature--later dean of creative arts at San Francisco State University--named August Coppola. “My dad was always playing great records or showing me great classical films and exposing me to all kinds of wonderful culture,” he says with pride and affection.

But Nicolas, whose parents divorced when he was 12, left Beverly Hills High School in the 11th grade. “I didn’t drop out,” he corrects firmly. “I took the GED and left. I didn’t like high school. And my father didn’t like the school system any more than I did. He felt life experience was the real teacher.”

And the life experience he was drawn to was acting.

“I was a skinny little boy and I used to get, you know, beat up by the kids in the back of the bus. I remember one day I dressed myself up as somebody else. I put on sunglasses and jeans and cowboy boots and I was chewing gum and had all this attitude and I told them: ‘I’m Nicky Coppola’s cousin, Roy Richards, and I’m going to beat you up if you mess with Nicky again.’

“And they believed it. And I think I knew then that I could make people believe I was somebody else. But I couldn’t be threatening or intimidating as me --I had to think I was somebody else in order to get there.”

He studied acting one summer at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and privately for a short time here. Mostly, however, he learned by doing--frequently as many as three films a year--trying experiments that sometimes led to mannerisms. He used to create characters by doing “crazy stunts. . . . Because I really didn’t know how to act.” He had his wisdom teeth pulled without Novocain to feel the pain of a disfigured Vietnam veteran in “Birdy” (1984) and ate a live cockroach to get in the mood for one of his favorite characters, the literary agent in “Vampire’s Kiss” (1989).

“Cher was a real champion for me,” he remembers fondly. “I had done ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ in 1986 where I got slammed by the critics--which I was quite happy about, really, because I was in a state where I wanted to do something that would shake people up for some reason. But Cher saw that movie and thought the performance was like a two-hour car accident and she really wanted me for ‘Moonstruck.’ ”

Cage says he is tempted to do theater--Lincoln Center’s Bernard Gersten is a family friend who has expressed interest and Cage has mentioned Eugene O’Neill--but “I’m really a film actor. I want a permanent record. I want to be there forever.”