As Nicolas Cage makes his Spider-Verse debut, don’t expect the veteran actor to swing into a Christopher Nolan movie anytime soon.
The Oscar-winning actor claimed that The Odyssey writer/director doesn’t “call me back” after Cage turned down a role in Nolan’s 2002 movie Insomnia, noting that many directors “get their feelings hurt” when he turns them down.
“David O. Russell offered me a movie a million years ago,” he told The New York Times. “It was a good movie, and he offered it and I said no, and he’s the only director that I ever said no to who actually came back and offered me another movie.
Cage, who plays John Madden in the upcoming Russell-helmed biopic Madden, premiering Nov. 26, added, “Most of them, they get their feelings hurt and don’t call you back. It’s happened a million times to me. It’s happened with Christopher Nolan, it’s happened with Woody Allen, it’s happened with Paul Thomas Anderson. They don’t call me back.”
Recalling that he turned down “a very early movie” with Paul Thomas Anderson, Cage said, “He’d shown me a short film with Philip Baker Hall—and we were going to do something and it didn’t work out.”
Christian Bale as Al Davis and Nicolas Cage as John Madden in ‘Madden’
Chuck Zlotnick
“Anyway, David did call me, and it showed a lot of class that he would call me back and invite me again, and I didn’t want to say no to him again because I have great respect for his talent,” he continued. “And it was a beautiful experience. I enjoyed working with David. I enjoyed working with Christian [Bale], John Mulaney.”
Starring Cage as the legendary football coach and sports commentator, Madden retraces the life of John Madden and his involvement in creating the Madden NFL video game series. The film also stars Bale, Mulaney, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller, Shane Gillis and Joel Murray.
