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There are many Hollywood stunts that, had they actually happened, would have broken as long as a DeLorean hitting potholes at 88mph. Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, Sean Connery as Gandalf, Bill Murray as the legendary Batman. And yet, if there has ever been a more deliciously unchanging moment than that Nicolas Cage like the Green Goblin / Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man from 2002, it may have already been confiscated by the police in the case of anti-stability cases.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Cage’s involvement in the film – An Entertainment Weekly article from 24 years ago he realized that Cage, John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe (who eventually took the part) were all “in Green Goblin”. But it seems that this is the first time that Cage himself has spoken about this in detail. I recommend the new Spider-Noir series, Cage told Variety: “Sam and I had lunch, and I said during lunch, ‘Listen: whoever plays Spider-Man, let him do one scene where he walks around like a spider when he’s alone,’ and it didn’t happen… He wanted me to do the Green Goblin. I liked the idea of Sam Raimi, because of Bad, Dead and I1 and 2.
Cage added: “I had this movie called Adaptation. It was with Jim (Carrey) and Dumb and Dumber, and I said, ‘I’m going to do this movie called Leaving Las Vegas,’ and with Sam, I said, ‘I’m going to do Adaptation.’ Both choices were right for me, and I’m happy with them.”
It’s hard to blame Cage for turning down the opportunity to take down Spidey in favor of Adaptation, the Susan Orlean-inspired Spike Jonze hall of mirrors In 2003 he was nominated for best actor at the Oscars. In addition, Dafoe gave the best performance he’s ever seen with his bittersweet, brooding portrayal of Goblin. And yet it’s hard not to imagine how Hollywood’s biggest boss would drag the whole business into strange, sweaty, even dysfunctional performance.
After all, Cage is an actor who has spent most of his time ignoring the concept of self-control. In Vampire’s Kiss, he he ate a cockroach. In Face/Off, he played a character pretending to be John Travolta pretending to be Nicolas Cage. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, they gave us mania and drug-addled iguanas. Imagine all the power poured into Norman Osborn: a billionaire, weapons developer and eccentric scientist who responds to the failed chaos by creating a new personality and exhilaratingly exterminates his enemies from a flying scooter.
Interestingly, Raimi may have been the director he used. Spider-Man it’s not a silly movie. It features rain-curled kisses, incinerated skeletons and strange explosions, genetically modified spiders and a final scene that resembles a Broadway disaster set in the middle of construction. Cage may have arrived as the final boss of the film himself, reeling in smoke as the entire picture began to descend.
Would it have been too much? One of the reasons Raimi’s Spider-Man is so good is that Dafoe plays Tobey Maguire’s brilliant portrayal of Peter Parker. He’s the twisted father Spidey never had, a warped vision of whatever wall-crawler he wants to be, made evil by his own greed, vanity and need for control. He goes hard, but always has the game sense to resume bombast at the right moment. Even under that hard green helmet, he finds the right weaponized madness: not campy, not scary, but something that oscillates strangely between the two.
Cage could have brought something more flaming, but he still managed to get into the pumpkin bomb. We will never know which way it would have gone. And the thing about Cage is that, for all his intelligence once he settles into the role, it’s possible that he doesn’t even know it.
