Nicolas Cage has said he only considered taking on roles on television after he watched Breaking Bad.
READ MORE: ‘Spider-Noir’ review: Nicolas Cage’s big, campy swing for the superhero crowd
The Oscar winner is taking on his first ever major TV role as the lead in Spider-Noir, the new Amazon Prime Video series based on the Marvel character Spider-Man Noir. All eight episodes of the show premiered this week (May 27), with Cage playing the aging private investigator and superhero in 1930s New York City as he grapples with his past.
The 62-year-old has had a long and successful career in film, but he has revealed that this diversion into the small screen was inspired by watching Bryan Cranston in AMC’s acclaimed series Breaking Bad.
Speaking to Variety, Cage said he had always been “adamant about not doing television”, because he “didn’t want to do anything that was too homogenised or that was like everybody else”.
That changed when his son showed him Vince Gilligan’s show during lockdown. “I began to see that the actors in that show were afforded the luxury of time to tell their story,” Cage said. “I saw Bryan Cranston staring at a suitcase for what seemed like minutes. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and all he was doing was staring at a suitcase, and it occurred to me that you can’t do that in movies. You don’t have the time.”
“I thought, maybe with an eight-hour narrative I can start planting seeds for a character that can bloom into something that I don’t have the luxury of time to do in a movie. That was the main attraction.”
He said he waited for a project that felt “special”, and landed on Spider-Noir. “And it was scary, and it was risky,” he explained. “I was constantly worried that I was going to get fired, because I was doing this thing of channelling old actors and colliding it with Stan Lee’s masterpiece that is Spider-Man to create this Roy Lichtenstein pop-art sensation of sorts. I didn’t know until I finally saw the eight episodes whether it was going to work.”
NME has rated Spider-Noir three stars and noted: “In the end, Spider-Noir may face an uphill battle for ratings – how much crossover do the modern Marvel blockbuster and pre-war crime fiction fandoms have? – but there’s a lot of fun to be had here. Much more than with any other recent Spider-Man spin-off, that’s for sure.”
Elsewhere, Cage has been reminiscing about the advice that he received from David Bowie about “reinventing yourself”.
The post Nicolas Cage only started considering TV roles after watching ‘Breaking Bad’ appeared first on NME.
