There are numerous sliding doors moments in Hollywood that, had they actually happened, would have fractured the space-time continuum like a DeLorean hitting potholes at 88mph. Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, Sean Connery as Gandalf, Bill Murray as a distinctly sardonic Batman. And yet, if there has ever been a more deliciously unhinged alternate timeline than Nicolas Cage as the Green Goblin/Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man from 2002, it has probably already been confiscated by the time police for crimes against narrative stability.
This is not the first time we’ve heard about Cage’s potential involvement in the film – Entertainment Weekly’s feature from 24 years ago noted that Cage, John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe (who eventually got the role) were all “up for the Green Goblin”. But it appears to be the first time Cage himself has spoken about it in any detail. While promoting the new series Spider-Noir, Cage told Variety: “Sam and I had a great lunch, and I did say during the lunch, ‘Listen: whoever plays Spider-Man, let them do one scene where they’re crawling around like a spider when they’re alone,’ and it didn’t happen … He wanted me to do the Green Goblin. I liked the idea of Sam Raimi, because of Evil Dead 1 and 2, and I wanted to work with him.”
Cage added: “I had this other film called Adaptation. It happened with Jim [Carrey] and Dumb and Dumber, and I said, ‘I’m going to do this other film called Leaving Las Vegas,’ and with Sam, I told him, ‘I’m going to do Adaptation.’ Both those decisions were the right ones for me, and I’m happy with those results.”
It’s hard to blame Cage for turning down the chance to take down Spidey in favour of Adaptation, the Susan Orlean-inspired Spike Jonze hall of mirrors that went on to see him nominated for best actor at the 2003 Oscars. Moreover, Dafoe provided quite possibly the finest supervillain performance ever seen with his superbly fermented, mirror-bothering take on the Goblin’s split identity. And yet it’s hard not to imagine how Hollywood’s great maximalist might have dragged the whole enterprise into some stranger, sweatier, even more operatically deranged dimension.
After all, Cage is an actor who has spent much of his career disregarding the idea of restraint. In Vampire’s Kiss, he ate a cockroach. In Face/Off, he played a man pretending to be John Travolta pretending to be Nicolas Cage. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, he gave us drug-addled cop mania and iguana hallucinations. Imagine all that energy poured into Norman Osborn: the billionaire father, weapons manufacturer and unstable scientist who responds to a failed boardroom coup by developing a new personality and cheerfully strafing his enemies from a flying murder-scooter.
The really tantalising thing is that Raimi might have been exactly the director to harness him. Spider-Man is not a sober film. It has rain-slicked upside-down kisses, skeletons vapourised by novelty explosives, genetically engineered spiders and a final act that resembles an off-Broadway tragedy performed amid falling masonry. Cage might have arrived as the logical final boss of the film’s own heightened reality, grinning through the smoke as the entire picture started levitating two feet off the ground.
Might it have been too much? One of the reasons Raimi’s Spider-Man is so great is that Dafoe plays the perfect, maniacally off-kilter foil to Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed ingenue of a Peter Parker. He’s the twisted father figure that Spidey never had, the distorted vision of everything the wall crawler wants to be, rendered monstrous by his own greed, vanity and need for control. He goes in hard, but always has the actorly discipline to rein in the bombast at exactly the right moment. Even beneath that rigid green helmet, he somehow finds a performance of precision-tooled lunacy: not quite camp, not quite horror, but something wobbling magnificently between the two.
Cage might have delivered something even more combustible, and yet he would have been just as likely to tip over into full pumpkin-bomb pantomime. We will never know which way it might have gone. And the thing about Cage is that, for all his brilliance when he absolutely nails a role, it’s just possible he has no idea either.
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