Nicolas Cage Got Real-Life 'Loaded' For His Drunken Outburst In Leaving Las Vegas
Nicolas Cage is an actor who always performs his all, but arguably his biggest and most intense performance is the one he won an Academy Award for — that of alcoholic screenwriter Ben Sanderson in "Leaving Las Vegas." The movie follows Sanderson as he tries to drink himself to death in Las Vegas, Nevada, a task that doesn't seem too difficult to anyone who's been there. He ends up involved in a complicated romance with a sex worker named Sera (Elisabeth Shue), which makes his suicidal tendencies capable of causing collateral damage and means he has to try and decide whether or not he wants to fight for his life after all. It's a brutal, heart-wrenching film and performance by Cage, but one scene in particular really left its mark on the actor and everyone who watched him.
In an interview with Vanity Fair where Cage rewatched several scenes from his own films, the actor revealed that he was actually very drunk while filming his character's inebriated breakdown in the movie. There's method acting and then there's getting hammered to portray a drunk guy, but to each their own! Cage's performance did win him the Oscar after all, so maybe there's something to be said for going all-in, just this once.
Swigging Sambuca for Leaving Las Vegas
Apparently, actor Albert Finney is a major inspiration to Cage, and he had also worked with "Leaving Las Vegas" writer and director Mike Figgus, so Cage asked about Finney's method for drunk acting. Finney would taste the alcohol and then spit it out, which is what Cage says he did for most of the film, but the big drunken rant needed something more. Cage explained that while he liked the idea of getting drunk for the whole picture, it just wasn't feasible. Still, he wanted to try to get "a real blackout" on camera for just one scene. He went on to explain that he had a "drinking coach" and that the two of them got wasted together:
"Had a drinking coach named Tony Dingman, family friend, at the time a drunk, a poet. We were drinking Sambuca, and he thought that would be a good choice for this scene. So I was drinking the Sambuca, and I was like, 'Whatever happens, get it, because this isn't gonna happen again.'"
Cage believes the performance is one of his very best, and it's hard to argue with that. He really put himself into the role and embodied the character in a way that's truly heartbreaking. In the sequence where he's genuinely drunk out of his mind onscreen and off, he also put in some of his personal life experience, transferring his desire to see his son more into the character's fight for custody.
The drunken performance of a lifetime
In figuring out how to portray Ben, Cage developed a backstory for him in which he had been divorced and was fighting for custody of his son. While filming "Leaving Las Vegas," Cage was trying to find the time to get to see his own child, so he really understood the fatherly longing to see his kid. The scene ended up with him screaming "I'm his father! I'm his father!" and that was something that Cage felt as deeply as Ben. This element of his performance was a "high-risk experiment" according to Cage, but it ended up winning him an Oscar.
Cage would go on to have another absolutely incredible drunk scene in the 2018 Panos Cosmatos movie "Mandy," though he didn't go method for that one and managed to perform a drunken, screaming meltdown without the assistance of alcohol. He's one of the best actors working today, even if his techniques are sometimes pretty unorthodox.