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

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.