Exploring caves in the nude, being stalked by mime artists, owning a two-headed snake and giving a big gambling windfall to orphans are just some of the urban legends that have been circulated as true concerning the colourful life of Hollywood royalty Nicolas Cage down the decades.
Intriguingly, Cage was in the mood to bust or confirm many such myths on Jimmy Kimmel Live following his return to the talk-show circuit after a 14-year absence. The 58-year-old Leaving Las Vegas Oscar winner is busy promoting his new film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Kimmel took the opportunity to get answers to questions that many fans and movie goers have been dying to ask him for years.
The cave tale had actually been shared recently on 54-year-old Kimmel's show by Cage's National Treasure co-star Diane Kruger. She claimed that, while filming the Disney adventure movie series between 2004 and 2007, the Face/Off actor came close to buying a cave heaving with bats that he wanted to explore with no clothes on.
Cage admitted that he had considered making such a purchase and that the cave he was looking at was "beautiful [with] milky white crystalline walls." If it had come into his possession, he also verified that he would have explored the hideaway naked with his then wife, but it remained a fantasy unfulfilled, as he decided against the transaction.
He did, however, corroborate the story that he was targeted by two mime artists for a spot of silent stalking. Having followed him around, Cage asked then politely to leave him alone and they obliged without uttering a word.
“We’re all being stalked at times. I think I was their only audience,” Cage told Kimmel.
The two-headed snake story was not a fairy tale either. The nephew of legendary Godfather director, Francis Ford Coppola recalled the coincidence of one night dreaming about two-headed eagles and, then, the next day Cage's manager was approached by somebody asking if the Moonstruck leading man wanted a two-headed snake.
Naturally, Cage replied yes but, with the two heads often fighting one another, he decided to take the animal to a zoo. The orphan anecdote, meanwhile, was another true story from around 20 years ago when the A-lister walked into a casino in the Bahamas with $200 and back out of it with 10 times that amount, despite his very unscientific method of just playing the same numbers all night on the roulette wheel.
“It was one of those nights where you feel like the mojo was with you, and nothing was going to go wrong,” the Raising Arizona actor pointed out. He then gave away his winnings to the local orphanage, much to the surprise of the children centre's headmistress.
Cage also told Kimmel that he has not placed a single bet since as the inevitable losses would ruin the "magic" of gambling for him. One final piece of Tinseltown gossip that Cage addressed was his ownership of a foul-mouthed African pied crow.
Describing the bird's sweary side, he declared: "He likes to say hi to me when I walk in the room, and when I leave he says bye. I don’t teach him the words. He came with the vocabulary and one day he called me an ‘a***hole’ and I don’t know why.”
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