Nicolas Cage's Best Role Brought Out A Very Real Fear For The Actor

I love it when Nicolas Cage goes for the gusto. My family constantly quoted his "Moonstruck" meltdown when I was growing up ("I lost my hand! I lost my bride!") and I'll take any excuse I can get to yell "Not the bees!" or "I'm a vampire!" in my everyday life. But I will also take Cage doing the kind of restrained, internal, and otherwise non-flashy acting that tends to get ignored by the Oscars (cough, Lily Gladstone in "Killers of the Flower Moon," cough) over a movie that calls on him to dial things up to 11 in a calculated bid at future viral success every day of the week.

Michael Sarnoski's "Pig" — which the Academy tellingly snubbed — is one such film. The low-budget 2021 drama casts Cage as Robin "Rob" Feld, a formerly distinguished chef who's forced to abandon his solitary existence foraging for truffles in the woods when his beloved truffle-sniffing pig is kidnapped. Fortunately, as much as that premise seems to lend itself to a silly action movie with Cage going all John Wick on the baddies who absconded with his four-legged companion, "Pig" itself is a far less conventional and even haunting drama about how we grapple with our pain and grief when the life we used to have is snatched away from us. That it had the good luck of coming out at a time when many people were struggling to adapt to their new lives in the post-COVID-19 lockdown world only made the film that much more cathartic to watch upon its original release.

For Cage, making the movie was a deeply personal experience for a very different albeit equally poignant reason. Namely, it allowed him to tap into his deep-rooted fear of losing one of his own real-life furry friends.

More relatable words have never been spoken than when Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz) on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," having only just gotten her new puppy, Arlo, announced to the world, "I've only had Arlo for a day and a half, but if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself." Whatever kind of furbabies you have in your life, the thought of losing them to anything but old age is about as terrifying as it gets. Speaking to IndieWire in 2022, Cage explained how he channeled his own fear of losing his cat Merlin into his performance in "Pig":

"I was at a point in my own life when I understood the feeling of loss. I understood the profound connection you can have with our animal brothers and sisters. I was always close with my cat. I had a terrible nightmare [after] I read the script: I had lost my cat Merlin, something horrible happened. I felt, 'I can play this organically, authentically, I don't need to go and force it.' Lo and behold when I got on set, it just came out. It was the right place and the right time for that kind of director-actor-protagonist relationship. It just flowed."

Later in the interview, Cage added that he would "go back to sense memory in some recent situations, my dreams of my cat, that was on my mind: God forbid something happened to my cat like what happened to Brandy the pig. It was a genuine fear and concern." Non-pet owners might scoff or roll their eyes at Cage's inspiration for one of his most heart-breaking and understated turns as an actor, but rest assured: When you're close to any animal, you would be absolutely shattered if something bad happened to them.