Nicolas Cage is making you pay the price of admission to see his “Longlegs” serial killer character.
“Longlegs” will be released July 12, but Cage will not spotted in any of the marketing materials or trailers. The actor told Entertainment Weekly that it’s for a very specific reason.
“It’s the equivalent of putting a warning label on a jar of nitroglycerin,” Cage said of keeping his character under wraps. “The monster is a highly, highly dangerous substance. The way it’s moved, unveiled, deployed has to be treated very carefully.”
He added, “Forget about the movie theater blowing up; the whole city could blow up, nay the country, maybe even the world. [My character] is going to change your reality. Your doors of perception are going to open, and your life is not going to be the same.”
“Longlegs” centers on FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who is tracking a Satanic serial killer (Cage) in the 1990s. The killer, who goes by the name Longlegs, leaves a coded message written in symbols at every crime scene.
The feature hails from writer/director Osgood Perkins. Cage said that the intricate storyline has a personal connection for both himself and Perkins, with each relating to their respective mothers’ plights.
“He blurted out, ‘This is a movie about my mom,’ which isn’t what you expect to hear from a director of a horror film,” Cage recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, oddly enough, Oz, I see this character as being about my mom and everything she had to deal with.’”
Cage’s mother, Joy Vogelsang, was schizophrenic, Cage said, adding that he channeled certain elements from her into the role.
“I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane?” Cage said. “It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn’t know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he’s really a tragic entity. He’s at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things.”
