Few actors are as fearless and unpredictable as Nicolas Cage. While he’s been regulated to memes and parodies over the last two decades, his recent output reflects an understanding that his craft runs deeper than catchphrases and outbursts. In interviews, he’s surprisingly forthcoming about his process and how he comes to the seemingly random choices he makes.
Speaking to Vanity Fair and rewatching some scenes from his most famous movies, Cage admits that his bravado performance as the one-handed baker Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck comes from a legend of silent cinema. In the film, Ronny and Loretta’s (Cher) meet cute comes in the form of the bread maker yelling about his missing hand, holding up his wooden paw, yelling, “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride! You want me to take my heartache, put it away, and forget?”
At first, the scene feels incongruous with what’s happening around him, but it also opens up the scene in new dramatic and comedic ways. However, he needed to balance it with a “grandiose gesture.” Director Norman Jewison told Cage that he could get “really hot really fast on camera,” in the understatement of the century. As a means of balancing some of that intensity, his hand movements were “choreographed” with moves that he “got from an old Fritz Lang movie called Metropolis.” Cage explains that his Moonstruck scene was a “direct steal” from the moment in Metropolis “where the mad scientist takes off the glove and shows his robot hand.”
“I was very impressionable when I first saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” he continued. “That moment with the scientist made a real impact on me. It’s designed, it’s choreographed, and that’s what German expressionism was, in my view. It was like almost choreographed acting. The moment of looking up at the hand and seeing it was a very grandiose gesture, but it worked.”
As for his missing teeth in the scene, well, he had some baby teeth left in his mouth and pulled them out for a role in Alan Parker’s Birdy. Just another day in the life of Nicolas Cage.