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Often when watching a Nicolas Cage performance, you’re left wondering exactly how the star manages to get in the zone for his most out-there scenes. Because nobody goes out-there quite like Cage – always with a sense of authenticity, never arbitrarily. And his latest thriller, The Surfer, is another dose of pure, uncut Cage – a heady, hardcore psychological thriller, in which a proposed day at the beach turns into a nightmare when Cage’s unnamed surfer is set upon by fellow nefarious wave-riders. It takes the actor to typically tubular territory as his psyche unravels – and one unexpected song helped him get there.
“I was listening to ‘Jump Around’ by House Of Pain,” Cage tells Empire. “For some reason, that song would come out when I was in my state of madness, when I was losing it at [the surfers] when they were torturing my character. It was just in my head.” While it doesn’t play during the film, the bouncy, party hip-hop banger was on a loop in Cage’s brain – and eventually spilled out onto the set. “I started mocking them back and I started singing it at them: ‘Are you gonna jump around? Jump around! Jump around!’ And then they started listening to it and then we were all singing it.” Anyone stepping on Cage, you’ll get burned.
The film, from Vivarium director Lorcan Finnegan, is none-more-Cage – and the actor was instantly hooked. “It spoke to me,” he says. “Because I’ve always believed that anyone can appear very normal and be very normal, but if you scratch the surface of that person long enough, the inner caveman’s coming out. That’s what I was meditating on. I wanted to show that ride: the humour of it, the sadness of it, the absurdity, the anger.” In short: he came to get down.