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.”