Stunt work in ‘Mandy’ helps Cage recover from injury
Says action scenes got him out of wheelchair
If you think Tom Cruise is the only middle-age Hollywood icon who can bounce back from a broken ankle to be an action hero, Nicolas Cage begs to differ.
While Cruise messed up his leg and then came back to finish “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” like a champ, Cage took up a chainsaw and a crazy-cool battle ax to deal with a villainous cult in the fantasy action thriller “Mandy” (in theaters and on digital platforms such as iTunes and Vudu Friday) just three months after ankle surgery.
Quite a few worried folks around him didn’t want him to do “Mandy” so soon after he fractured his ankle in Bulgaria in spring 2017 while shooting the action film “211.” It was “probably not something that, in hindsight, one would recommend,” Cage says. “But interestingly enough, having to get up to speed with the stunts and the fight sequences in a very short amount of time actually was great for my rehabilitation. Because there was no time and no margin for error, it pushed me, literally, out of the wheelchair and off of the cane and got me back on my feet. So kind of a happy accident.”
It also worked out for director Panos Cosmatos, since Cage’s bum ankle gave the filmmaker extra time to prep the movie’s 27-day shoot. “I was concerned that the injury would slow production, but he healed in record time,” Cosmatos says. “Just in case, I began incorporating the injury into the character, but none of that turned out to be necessary.”
Set in 1983, “Mandy” stars Cage as a lumberjack named Red who lives amid the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest with his beloved Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Their idyllic life is torn asunder when a murderous cult leader (Linus Roache) brutally kills her, sending Red on a violent, drug-fueled odyssey of vengeance.
Once Cage made the “crazy” decision to do “Mandy” while still recovering from his injury, Cosmatos recommended he watch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1982 film “Conan the Barbarian” for inspiration. “I said, ‘Well, what is it about it that you like?’ He said, ‘It’s an R-rated fantasy.’ Just to put it as simply as that,” Cage says. “I guess I am playing a barbarian of sorts, but he’s not going to be like a musclebound barbarian.”
One key aspect to constructing the fight sequences was figuring out Red’s
moves and demeanor, specifically how they change once he drinks “skull juice” dosed with a supernatural drug. Before, Red is “feral and almost catlike, animated and ferocious,” Cage says, but after he imbibes it, he’s much more akin to a golem (the one from Jewish folklore, not “Lord of the Rings”), “like a monolith” or a stalking monster akin to Jason Voorhees of “Friday the 13th” fame. “So by the end, he’s just sort of almost going through the motions and Mandy herself is his guardian, almost like a goddess from another dimension.”
One of the most harrowing scenes in “Mandy” doesn’t involve swinging an ax or clashing chainsaws. After being forced to watch his worst nightmare come to pass, he has a breakdown that is “emotionally vulnerable and raw in its nakedness,” Cage says.
He knows audiences might find it uncomfortable. When he watched the movie at the Sundance Film Festival, “there were some people who didn’t really know how to react to that kind of display of embarrassing emotion, which is what it had to be to go on the ride with Red and have it be meaningful. He’s not a hulking barbarian, but he’s you and I and me and you. That’s what gives the movie that sort of heart to have that emotion and that kind of love and then that sort of extraordinary grief that comes from loss of love.”