Nicolas Cage has a long list of roles he turned down. What he didn’t expect was a long list of directors who stopped calling as a result.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times published ahead of the launch of his Prime Video series “Spider-Noir,” Cage named Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Woody Allen as filmmakers who went cold after he declined their projects. “Most of them, they get their feelings hurt and don’t call you back. It’s happened a million times to me,” Cage said.
The Nolan offer was for a role in “Insomnia,” the director’s 2002 psychological thriller — a film that came after “Memento” and before Nolan began the Batman trilogy. The film ultimately starred Al Pacino and the late Robin Williams. Cage did not identify which role he was offered, and the gap between any version of the two leads and Cage’s particular screen energy makes the casting-that-never-happened one of Hollywood’s more tantalizing hypotheticals.
On Paul Thomas Anderson, Cage recalled being shown an early short film featuring Philip Baker Hall — the actor who anchored Anderson’s debut feature “Hard Eight” — with a potential collaboration that never materialized.
The interview also gave Cage an opportunity to single out the rare director who responded to rejection with persistence rather than silence. David O. Russell, Cage noted, had offered him a film years earlier that Cage turned down — and then came back with another offer anyway. “David O. Russell offered me a movie a million years ago,” Cage said. “It was a good movie, and he offered it and I said no, and he’s the only director that I ever said no to who actually came back and offered me another movie.” That second offer became “Madden,” the Amazon MGM Studios biopic in which Cage plays legendary NFL coach John Madden alongside Christian Bale as Raiders owner Al Davis, set for a November 26, 2026 release on Prime Video.
The interview landed at a characteristically busy moment for Cage. “Spider-Noir,” an eight-episode live-action Prime Video series in which he plays Ben Reilly, an aging private investigator in 1930s New York who once operated as the masked vigilante known as the Spider, premieres May 27.
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The role builds on Cage’s animated voicing of a version of the character in Sony’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” in 2018, and the series can be watched in either black-and-white or color. Nolan, for his part, is currently preparing his own high-profile production, “The Odyssey,” which has drawn its own share of public scrutiny. Whether the two men ever find their way to the same project remains, for now, firmly in the no-call zone.
