Nicolas Cage ready to quit movies, wants to pivot to television

Nicolas Cage is about ready to pack it up on film and pivot to television. “I feel I’ve pretty much said what I’ve had to say with cinema,” he reveals in a new interview with Uproxx. “I think I have to do maybe three or four more movies before I can get there, and then hopefully switch formats and go into some other way of expressing my acting.”

In fact, he’d be happy to go out on the “high note” of Dream Scenario, but he’s contractually obligated on those last three or four flicks. After that, he wants to explore what else there is to offer for an actor out there. This is mostly because Cage’s son just showed him Breaking Bad “like last year” and it made him “very interested in immersion streaming with episodic television.” He says, “I have seen things that can be done now with characters and the time they’re given to express themselves. I saw Bryan Cranston stare at a suitcase for an hour on one episode of Breaking Bad. We don’t have time to do that in a feature film, so maybe television is the next best step for me. We’ll see.”

Cage feels he’s “explored the margins of film performance” and “done every genre,” to the point that “the only thing I haven’t really done is Broadway and I haven’t done a television show.” As a self-described student, he ponders, “where do I go that would challenge me and stretch me and make me grow in some way? Where would I go where I would learn? How do I pour yeast on my education as an actor?” He reflects, “I don’t know if I have anything else to learn in cinema. I might have something to learn in television.”

There are other benefits to becoming a TV actor. For one thing, Cage wonders if he might be less meme’d if people can spend more time with him embodying one role. “But more importantly, I want to spend some quality time with my family,” he says. “And I’m going to be 60 next month and my dad died at 75. So it’s like, if I’m lucky, I have more years than he did, but I don’t know. And so what am I going to do with my next 15 years? Well, what’s important? What’s important is my children and I have a baby daughter. And if I can find an episodic show to do that stays in one place where I don’t have to keep leaving, we can all be together.”

As much as Cage reiterates he’s ready to say “Adios” to cinema, he’s not closing the door entirely. Instead, “it’s going to be a very severe and stringent selection process” for his film projects. “I’m saying if something came along that I thought had some pop to it, some spark to it, that maybe could be fun for folks to revisit, like a Face/Off 2 or Ghost Rider, that’s another conversation,” he explains. “But I mean, that’s not going out and finding a brand new bit of material and trying something else. I’m still developing my ideas about all this. Who knows what will really happen?”