Nicolas Cage has called his infamous 1990 interview with Terry Wogan, where he somersaulted and stripped off, ‘obnoxious.’
The Oscar-winning actor, 61, is well-known for his onscreen meltdowns – from Deadfall to Leaving Las Vegas and many more – but one notorious interview trumps them all.
In 1990, Cage appeared on the talk show Wogan promoting the iconic David Lynch film Wild At Heart, in which the actor stars as Sailor Ripley, who goes on the run with girlfriend Lula Fortune (Laura Dern).
And Cage really was wild at heart as he was introduced on the show, immediately proceeding to do a somersault and several karate kicks.
After throwing money into the audience, he finally sat down for his interview – but not without removing his t-shirt and handing it to Wogan halfway through.
The bizarre momentum kept going throughout, with the National Treasure star admitting that if he hadn’t become an actor, he might have enjoyed ‘robbing banks’ instead.
Now, 35 years on, Cage has said he feels the fever-dream chat show appearance might have been a little bit ‘obnoxious.’
‘I remember Terry Wogan was a very nice man and I enjoyed the interview with him, although I thought I was both obnoxious and somewhat wild,’ the Longlegs star told The Guardian.
‘I guess it’s no secret that I was promoting a movie called Wild at Heart, so I was sort of play acting to that.’
The Renfield actor also elaborated on why he decided to wear nothing but a leather jacket for his talk with Wogan, who died aged 77 in 2016 of prostate cancer.
‘I remember, as a child, I was in a car, a guy was walking down the street, and he had a leather jacket on and no shirt on underneath. I thought: “Well, that’s an interesting look”,’ Cage continued.
‘I don’t know why that came back to me when I went on Terry’s show, but I thought, “I’m going to create that look again.” It was incredibly absurd and irreverent. I don’t have that leather jacket anymore.’
It comes as Cage’s latest film, bizarre thriller The Surfer, comes to cinemas.
In the film, there is yet another signature wild Cage moment that sees his character killing a rat and later eating it, a moment the actor has revealed was entirely his idea.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Cage confirmed that it was he who wanted to say ‘Eat the rat!’ before being inspired by the quality of the rubber prop to go one step further.
‘I had gotten the idea from an old Billy Wilder movie called Sabrina, where Humphrey Bogart takes an olive out of a martini glass, puts it in his uncle’s mouth and says: “Eat it”,’ he revealed.
‘I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw that moment. When I saw the prop rat, I said, ‘I’ll put it in my pocket,’ because I liked the way the rubber tail was moving,’ he explained, adding that he found it ‘amusing’ and felt he could ‘use’ it in some way.
Cage decided to ‘channel it in more of a punk rock way than Bogart did with the olive, by shoving the rat in Pitbull’s [Alexander Bertrand] mouth’.
He continued: ‘It was a cathartic moment. By that point in the movie, I thought my character has gone through enough suffering and that he’s earned the right to go big and shove a rat in the guy’s mouth.’
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