There seem to be countless strange stories involving Nic Cage’s acting process, but this is pretty odd.

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To make it in Hollywood, an actor needs to pull off some truly incredible things. After all, they have to convince a movie studio to take a chance on casting them in their massively expensive project, and then they have to cross their fingers that the movie is a success.

On top of that, they have to give a good enough performance that they convince moviegoers that it will be worth it to see their following projects.

Given all of the hoops that movie stars have to jump through to make it to the top, it makes sense that most of them seem very afraid of losing it all.

For that reason, it often seems like the vast majority of major movie stars are far too afraid to take any big chances with their careers. On the other end of the spectrum, Nicolas Cage seems to be happy to roll the dice with his public profile at every turn.

As a result of the fact that it seems like he takes every role that is offered to him these days, Nicolas Cage keeps starring in horrifically awful movies. On top of that, Cage has headlined some extremely weird movies. With all of that in mind, it isn’t overly surprising that when Cage was working on one film he made the strange decision to go out of his way to make his co-stars afraid of him.

Cage’s Acting Perspective

During Nicolas Cage’s long career, he has portrayed many characters that people have grown to love. On the other hand, some of Cage’s characters failed to make a big enough impact to pass the test of time.

For example, even though the Ghost Rider films are based on a Marvel character and comic book movies are a massive deal, Cage’s portrayal of the character is often overlooked.

Even though they aren’t talked about much anymore, Nicolas Cage put a lot of effort into the Ghost Rider movies. When Cage was promoting Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, he revealed how much time and effort he put into playing the supernatural side of the titular character.

While talking to Empire Online, Cage revealed that he found it pretty easy to get into the human side of Ghost Rider. On the other hand, Cage also stated that to be in proper mindest to play the Spirit of Vengeance, Cage reflected on the writings of a man named Brian Bates.

“He put forth the concept that all actors, whether they know it or not, stem from thousands of years ago—pre-Christian times—when they were the medicine men or shamans of the village.

And these shamans, who by today’s standards would be considered psychotic, were actually going into flights of the imagination and locating answers to problems within the village. They would use masks or rocks or some sort of magical object that had power to it.”

Scared Co-Stars

In order to prepare to star in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Nicolas Cage worked to connect to Dracula in a truly unique way. On top of that, as he revealed in the aforementioned Empire Online interview, Cage adopted some truly strange acting techniques, to say the very least.

“I would paint my face with black and white makeup to look like an Afro-Caribbean icon called Baron Samedi, or an Afro-New Orleans icon who is also called Baron Saturday.

He is a spirit of death but he loves children; he’s very lustful, so he’s a conflict in forces. And I would put black contact lenses in my eyes so that you could see no white and no pupil, so I would look more like a skull or a white shark on attack.”

“On my costume, my leather jacket, I would sew in ancient, thousands-of-years-old Egyptian relics, and gather bits of tourmaline and onyx and would stuff them in my pockets to gather these energies together and shock my imagination into believing that I was augmented in some way by them, or in contact with ancient ghosts.

I would walk on the set looking like this, loaded with all these magical trinkets, and I wouldn’t say a word to my co-stars or crew or directors. I saw the fear in their eyes, and it was like oxygen to a forest fire. I believed I was the Ghost Rider.”

Unfortunately for everyone involved in the production of the movie, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was far from a sensation at the box office. Worse yet, considering how much work he put into his starring role, Nicolas Cage had to be disappointed that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has a poor critics and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.