Face/Off: How Nicolas Cage, Die Hard and a confused Johnny Depp helped make an action classic
20.04.2022 - 18:45
/ msn.com
John Travolta with Cage’s own face grafted on – as happens when the actors trade places in the 1997 actioner Face/Off – but when Cage met a life-size replica of himself. It had hair, wrinkles, remote controlled facial features, and an internal bladder system that allowed the Cage-a-like dummy to simulate breathing. He and Travolta had been recreated as robotised dummies for the film’s pivotal surgery scene, in which their faces are sliced off and swapped around.
“Nic apparently saw the replica and was really affected,” says Michael Colleary, co-writer and producer of Face/Off. “They had to go in and clear the set or something, so Nic could go in and look at it… it looked like him dead!” “He was flipped out!” laughs Mike Werb, Colleary’s writing and producing partner. Cage meets a similar, Madame Tussauds-style replica in the new self-lampooning action-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (“Is this supposed to be me? It’s grotesque”), which is released in cinemas on Friday (22 April).
It’s a nod to Face/Off’s rightful rep as one of the Nic Cagiest things to happen in the whole history of bonkers, mad-eyed, cranked-up Cage-ness. Now, 25 years since its original release, Face/Off remains part of the Holy Trinity of Nic Cage Nineties action, along with The Rock (1996) and Con Air (1997). It came just a year after Cage had won the Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas, and his crushing performance as a suicidal drunk.
Travolta, meanwhile, was riding the wave of resurgence after the cutting-edge cool of Pulp Fiction (1994) and Get Shorty (1995). Travolta had even been branded, amusingly in hindsight, “the coolest man alive” by Empire magazine in April 1996. In Face/Off, Cage and Travolta play mortal enemies: Cage is
.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.