For all the wildly varying opinions that audiences had about Ezra Miller’s The Flash and its multiversal shenanigans, I still can’t believe that it’s the movie that finally delivered Nicolas Cage’s first live-action Superman appearance. The gobsmacking cameo came during the superhero movie’s world-smashing climax, with a giant eight-legged reference to Tim Burton’s unproduced Superman Lives feature. Cage previously addressed his joy in finally donning the Man of Steel’s emblem, but has now opened up about the actual process, revealing there weren’t any giant spiders involved in conversations during filming.
Though a number of The Flash viewers believed Nicolas Cage’s cameo to have been birthed entirely through CGI, possibly with A.I. assistance, the Dream Scenario actor confirmed he was indeed physically present within the Superman suit, and had nothing but compliments for director Andy Muschietti while also revealing what he was told the scene was going to be about. Here’s how he put it in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment:
First and foremost, I was on set. They did put a lot of time into building the suit … and I think [Andy] is a terrific director, he is a great guy and a great director, and I loved his two It movies. ... What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe. Kal-El was bearing witness [to] the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey. I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours.
So he was apparently told to just stare out into the destruction of oblivion, which is a pretty tall order. Cage continued, directly addressing the spider-ness of it all.
When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did. I don’t think it was [created by] AI. I know Tim is upset about AI, as I am. It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider. I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.
I dunno about you guys, but I’m more than a little baffled to know that Cage was literally kept in the dark over what that moment was going to look like in its final form on-screen. It seems odd to have one of Hollywood’s most interesting thespians in a Superman suit, and to mostly just have him stand there looking at what he believes to be the total annihilation of an entire universe. That’s a hard concept to wrap one’s head around, regardless of what the context of the situation is.
Obviously the time constraints had a lot to do with that, since Andy Muschietti & Co. couldn’t exactly set up any super-complicated shots or sequences for Cage to take part in. And I’m sure it would have been that much more complicated to de-age those facial features if his Kal-El was facing the camera while flying around and blasting shit. But still, at least tell the guy there’s a multi-legged monster involved.
Perhaps holding back on that information was due to the creative team not actually knowing what that scene would look like. Considering all the pre-visualization and effects work in the film, it’s hard to imagine any shot making it to the filming stage without being storyboarded to death, but maybe that’s how the scheduling worked out. Or maybe they just didn’t want to admit in the moment that they were resurrecting Jon Peters’ bonkers idea for a superhero climax. Can’t totally blame anyone if that’s the case, considering that idea killed a whole movie.
Whatever the case may be, here’s hoping Nicolas Cage at least enjoyed watching sort-of-himself fighting a bigass monster in The Flash, and that it somehow inspires James Gunn to tap the actor’s talents for his and Peter Safran’s new DCU. While waiting to see what happens there, Barry Allen’s time-traveling antics can be streamed with a Max subscription.
