Question: what’s the best four minutes and 13 seconds you can spend on the internet? Steady now. Let’s keep it clean. I’d like to suggest ‘Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit’, a compilation of the great Hollywood star doing what he does best. Posted on YouTube in 2011, this slavishly edited clip-reel has had almost a million views. Cutting to Clint Mansell’s wailing score from Requiem For A Dream, it features Cage stomping, shouting, swearing, screaming and, in one scene, reciting the entire alphabet at top volume.

All the excerpts are taken from films belonging to the more unhinged corners of Cage’s canon such as erotic thriller Zandalee (where his self-destructive artist covers himself in paint) or crime caper Deadfall (as a moustachioed goon having a child-like tantrum on a bed). Needless to say, it’s hugely entertaining; rather like Cage, an actor who has never been scared of cranking things up to the max. This is not just over-acting in the Al Pacino hoo-ha way. No. This is Cage Rage, a sort of rocket-fuelled, out-on-a-limb intensity that few actors dare to get close to.

^{Renfield (2023)}

Across a 42-year career, Cage has shown the courage to take on the wildest of characters, even playing a version of himself in last year’s The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent. Is he a joke? Or is the joke on us? This, after all, is an actor who won an Oscar for his searing portrait of an alcoholic screenwriter in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas. He then went on to become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid names, starring in action vehicles like The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. Since then, the cult of Cage has swelled exponentially. 

Next up, he stars in Renfield, a horror-comedy that casts him as Dracula, surely a role he was born to play. While the spotlight is on the Prince Of Darkness’ titular assistant (played by British actor Nicholas Hoult), let’s face it, everyone who’s buying a ticket to this is doing so to see Cage play the pale-faced icon. ‘I want a handful of nuns, a busload of cheerleaders,’ he demands, instructing Renfield to round up some virginal targets. The mind boggles.

^{Raising Arizona (1987)}

Still, it’s nothing we shouldn’t expect from the 59-year-old Cage, whose love of cinematic blood-suckers stretches back to 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss. A flop at the time, this film featured him playing a literary agent who starts to believe he’s a member of the undead, leading to a legendary sequence as he runs down the street yelling ‘I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!’. Over and over again.

Later, he produced the Oscar-nominated Shadow Of A Vampire, which cast Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the actor who played Nosferatu in the 1922 silent classic; the twist in this telling being that Schreck himself has a lust for blood. Renfield, of course, taps right into Cage’s penchant for larger-than-life caricature.

^{Wild At Heart (1990)}

There’s something of the comic book about a lot of his characters. He famously used Marvel’s Luke Cage to supply his own stage name and came close to playing the Man Of Steel himself in Tim Burton’s shelved Superman Lives; that would surely have been one of the greatest incarnations of the DC Comics superhero to ever reach our screens. Since then, he’s given us Marvel’s bike-riding Ghost Rider and Big Daddy in Kick-Ass while he voiced Spider-Man Noir in the animated Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.

^{Moonstruck (1987)}

Rightly or wrongly, Cage’s reputation for being a Hollywood extremist drags around his Cuban heels. His marriage to the late Lisa Marie Presley lasted just 108 days, he named his son Kal-El after Superman, and he’s prone to method-style moments of madness to find his characters (famously yanking two teeth out, without anaesthetic, when he was preparing to play a Vietnam veteran in Alan Parker’s Birdy). Nephew of film director Francis Ford Coppola, he’s almost like the black sheep of that clan, the sort you wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off at a family barbecue. 

When The Guardian once interviewed him, the headline was ‘people think I’m not in on the joke’; a slightly doctored quote from the article that referred to how he and director Neil LaBute were ‘in’ on the absurdity of their 2006 remake of pagan horror The Wicker Man. That atrocious film is easily the most meme-worthy of Cage’s career (and that’s saying something), as he runs around in a bear costume, punching women and getting attacked by bees (‘not the bees!’).

^{Pig (2021)}

Yet in a way, Cage clearly is in on the joke. Despite all the straight-to-video duffers, he’s still capable of unearthing B-movie gems like Mandy or the Richard Stanley-directed HP Lovecraft movie Colour Out Of Space, playing to the increasingly rabid fanbase who get their kicks from Cage hitting boiling point. Likewise, he knows when to dial it down, like in the recent Pig, as a reclusive truffle hunter who ventures into the Portland restaurant scene to go looking for his kidnapped hog. Cage has worked with some of the best directors in the world: the Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona), Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out The Dead), Paul Schrader (Dog Eat Dog), Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes). And roughly once every few years, he also delivers a bona fide classic, like his Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman collaboration Adaptation. Not many actors would score an Oscar nod for playing a maudlin screenwriter and his upbeat twin. But then, not many actors are Nicolas Cage.

Renfield is in cinemas from Friday 14 April.