Nicolas Cage Reveals What DC Character Would Be Fun To Play

JB Augustine |

Apr 14, 2023

Cage the Dracula — Nicolas Cage as Dracula in Renfield (2023)

Playing the Man of Steel in the Tim Burton-directed Superman Lives didn’t pan out for Nicolas Cage, who’s had a grand number of pivotal and strange roles in his career. It’s that ill-fated one, however, that he held onto as a dream job up until the year 2000. Marvel was more giving to the eccentric superstar later on with Ghost Rider.

Cage got to play the Spirit of Vengeance twice in very tonally different turns which he followed up with Kick-Ass and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse, but DC was never far from his mind. Playing his Holy Grail of Superman is virtually out of the question, although there are other characters than just Kryptonians and the Bat-Family.

One he thinks “would be a fun one” is along the same lines as Ghost Rider and that comes with one key complexity: he’s nigh unstoppable. That character is the dead cop-turned-avenger of the afterlife known commonly as The Spectre. Real name Jim Corrigan, he’s had chances to appear in movies that went nowhere, but Cage might like a crack at changing Corrigan’s luck.

“Jim Corrigan, the Spectre (old DC comic character). That would be a fun one. But that’s a hard one to pull off because he’s virtually invincible, he has no weakness. You need characters that have kryptonite, that have a flaw, but he’s kinda unbeatable. But that would be a fun one,” Cage answered in a Reddit AMA.

Corrigan would have been a character in an aborted Justice League Dark movie directed by Doug Liman. His Spectre might rise again in the DCU if JJ Abrams moves ahead with his JLD series of projects, but the prospect of that is less and less likely as time moves on and with James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge of DC Studios.

For now, Nicolas Cage is wrapped up in the relaunch of Universal’s Monster icons in Renfield where he portrays another creature of the night, and the most infamous, Dracula. The film is in theaters this weekend and later in the AMA, Cage revealed his inspirations and his favorite portrayals of the Transylvanian Count through the years.

“Dracula itself, I think that while Bela Lugosi was an enormous impact on the character actually and he did it without any fangs,” he said. “My Dracula was Christopher Lee and the Hammer Horror films. I loved his look and, uh, the danger and the animality with which he brought to the character.” Cage also really liked Max Schreck’s performance in Nosferatu.