Seven roles that explain the deeply nuanced, not crazy art of Nicolas Cage

The actor's work is often more textured and soulful than he's given credit for.

- Alissa Wilkinson

We've reached the point in Nicolas Cage's career when it's easiest to refer to every new movie he's in by just describing his antics in them.

Dracula Cage, terrible boss— that’s Renfield. Moody chef Cage, retriever of beloved animal — that’s Pig. Serial killer Cage, servant of Satan—that’s Longlegs.

The tactic works because it’s easy to imagine Cage donning any of those guises, and a thousand more besides. Many a commenter has noted Cage’s propensity for roles that can be described only as crazy, but the actor’s career is too expansive, and often more nuanced, to be reduced to his unhinged characters. Tell me he’s going to play, I don’t know, a ballet master or a mob boss or an enraged father (as in his latest movie, The Surfer) and I'll believe you, because Cage has proved that he contains multitudes, over and over again. Sometimes he even plays more than one guy in the same movie — as in my favorite of his films, Adaptation, in which he appears as twins.

That means the best way to get a grip on Cage as an artist is to consider him through his many faces. Even when he occasionally takes that face, um, off.

Moonstruck (1987)

The Sincere Love Interest Early on, Cage worked to establish a career apart from his family name. (Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle, and directors Roman and Sofia Coppola and actor Jason Schwartzman are his cousins.) He managed it swiftly in a string of movies that included many performances as a tousled, passionate, somewhat unpredictable young man. What shines through each is a full-bodied commitment to whatever the character's emotional reality is - all the roiling desires, the suffering, the ecstasy.

A great representative performance from this era is his turn as the lovelorn hothead Ronny, who's smitten with his brother's fiancée (Cher) in the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck.