Nicolas Cage shares his top five of favorite films that he’s done while promoting new Dracula movie

Nicolas Cage shared his own top five Nicolas Cage movies on Thursday’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS while promoting his new Dracula movie.

Surprisingly, the 59-year-old Academy Award-winning actor didn’t choose his massive blockbusters as favorites.

“I’m going to start with Pig, which is my favorite movie I’ve ever made,” said Nicolas. “I love Mandy, the movie Panos directed. I love Bringing Out The Dead that Martin Scorsese directed. I loved bad lieutenant [by] Werner Herzog. I loved a movie called Joe that David Gordon Green directed.”

“I have Face/Off,” Stephen said.

‘Oh, I like that very much,’ Nicolas said. “You know what’s interesting about Face/Off and I, I could have mentioned Vampire’s Kiss because Vampire’s Kiss was a little movie I made where I got to explore my more abstract dreams with movie achievements.”

“Unfortunately I was playing a character who was going crazy, but he started to think so. The Vampire from the original Nosferatu movie. And if you’re playing a character who’s losing his mind, he can believe he’s Nosferatu. So I have to act like a German expressionist silent movie star, and that was cool, like these facial expressions and stuff. But Face/Off was a big movie, a big studio movie that I made at Paramount, and I was able to take what I learned from this little Vampire’s Kiss movie and put it into this huge movie. And it worked. And I was like, people really dig this. So I was very happy with those results.’

Nicolas also explained that he wasn’t pretentious during COVID when he said he identified more as an actor than an actor. Stephen had asked him how he made headlines when he said he preferred the word thespian to the word actor.

“I wonder why being pretentious is so attractive to you?” Stephen joked.

“What I said was, of course you can call me an actor,” Nicolas said. ‘ And by the way, I never said, ‘Don’t call me an actor. Call me a thespian” That’s what the clickbait universe did and put out and somehow got picked up by CNN. Not sure how it got picked up by CNN. I’m sure they have more important things to say. ‘

“I see acting as storytelling and what it is is trying to get to the truth of a character,” said Nicolas.

Nicholas added that the first actor in Europe was someone named Thespis who broke away from the chorus and started narrating and telling a truthful story. While the term actor, he said, had a completely different meaning.

“The word actor in Greek means hypocrite,” Nicolas said. “Well, I don’t want to be thought of as a hypocrite. I’m sorry if that sounds pretentious.’

Nicolas described his new movie Renfield in which he plays Dracula and has a long-suffering servant named Renfield trying to escape their toxic, codependent relationship.

“He’s trying to free himself from that and Dracula won’t let him,” Nicholas said. “I’m sure they had a lot of fun together, maybe 200 years ago on the road… but now the relationship has soured and Renfield wants out.”

Nicolas explained that Dracula sees Renfield wanting to leave as a betrayal and that the film tries to mix horror with comedy. Nicolas said his character then goes into codependent group therapy.

“That was the tricky balance, because it’s actually not a funny topic, it’s a serious topic,” said Nicolas. “So we had to find a way to play it and give it pathos with genuine respect for this dire situation, then tap dance around it to see where we could find the humor, if you will.”

Nicolas said he loved the mix of horror and comedy.

“You wouldn’t think horror and comedy would go so well together, but when you think of American Werewolf In London, great,” said Nicolas. “That’s the bullseye we were trying to hit with Renfield.”

Stephen then played an excerpt from the movie. Stephen asked him how he prepared to play the role of Dracula. Nicolas shared that he drew inspiration from actor Christopher Lee, his own father who always spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent, and even the actress Ann-Margaret Olsson from the movie The Graduate in the way she seduced and manipulated Dustin Hoffman.

“I want to speak with distinction because I am a literature professor and so he had his reasons, but I could never understand why he spoke in that continental[accent],” Nicolas said of his father.

Stephen asked him if he had ever kept clothes from his films.

“Well, I came into Wild at Heart with this snakeskin jacket I found at Aardvark, a thrift store near Melrose,” Nicolas said. “I said, I don’t know where, but I’m going to wear it in a movie someday.”

Nicholas said he showed it to David Lynch, who loved it.

“That’s solid gold, buddy,” Nicholas remembered David saying about the jacket.

Nicolas also shared how he met his two icons Marlon Brando and Jerry Lewis. He said he met Brando after attending a screening of one of his movies.

“I said afterwards, I said, Marlon, I just wanted to know that everything you’ve done has really inspired me to be an actor and he said ‘Jesus, Nick, give me a goddamn break’.”

Nicolas said he got a very different reaction when he met Jerry Lewis backstage after one of his shows in Las Vegas.

“He came out in a Japanese kimono and baseball socks with a shrimp dish on the piano and I just said, ‘Jerry, I just want to let you know it’s really for me, it’s just you and Brando.’ And he took a break for about 30 minutes. And he said, “Well, Brando’s good too.”

Stephen asked him if it was true that he was thinking about doing a musical. Nicolas said he had blown his voice out over the years when he sang Prince’s Purple Rain in karaoke bars and only one part was right.

“But I think that would lend itself to Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar,” Nicolas said.

Nicolas then started singing the musical’s song to Stephen. Stephen said he would quit his job to star in that musical.