Nicolas Cage says his pet snake tried to hypnotise him (Picture: JC Olivera/Getty Images)
Nicolas Cage has claimed that his pet snake tried to ‘hypnotise’ him – and he used the experience as inspiration for his role in Ghost Rider, because of course he did.
The 58-year-old is the proud owner of a number of animals including a pig, a Maine Coon cat named Merlin, and terrapins, with him now revealing how his pets have been the inspiration behind some of his biggest roles.
Speaking about how he gets into characters, the movie icon said: ‘Sometimes the animals can help, especially the reptiles.
‘At one time I had a cobra, and it would try to hypnotise me by showing me the pattern of an eye on its back and then turning around to attack.
‘I used that in Ghost Rider, where my character would do that weird Axl Rose dancing and then attack,’ he told Empire.
He also discussed how a nightmare about his cat Merlin proved invaluable to his role in 2021’s Pig, in which Nic portrays a truffle-hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness and must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped.
Nicolas said he used the hypnosis as inspiration for Ghost Rider (Picture: Instagram/auduboninstitute/Stacey Doyle)
‘Merlin was a big inspiration for Pig,’ he explained. ‘When I first met [writer-director] Michael Sarnoski, we talked about what [my character] Rob is going through.
‘Of course, it’s the loss of the pig but also some deeper grief from the past.
‘I had this horrible nightmare about Merlin, and that was a gift, in a weird way, because I felt the loss as if something terrible had really happened to him.’
Nicolas has quite the bond with his pets, and revealed in 2010 that he had once taken magic mushrooms with another of his cats, Lewis.
Nicolas has a unique bond with his many pets (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images)
He told David Letterman how Lewis had been admiring a bag of magic mushrooms he kept in his fridge before eating them ‘voraciously’.
‘It was like catnip to him. So, I thought what the heck, I’d better do it with him,’ he said. ‘I remember lying in my bed for hours and Lewis was on the desk across from the bed for hours, staring at each other… not moving. But he would stare at me, and I had no doubt that he was my brother.’
Nicolas also has a pet crow named Hoogan that calls him curse names, he told Los Angeles Times earlier this year.
Nicolas recently revealed how he was convinced he was an alien as a child (Picture: ABC via Getty Images)
‘He has taken to calling me names… it’s comical, at least, it is to me. When I leave the room, he’ll say, “Bye,” and then go, “A**hole.” Crows are very intelligent,’ he said.
‘And I like their appearance, the Edgar Allan Poe aspect. I like the goth element. I am a goth.’
Earlier this month, Nicolas told how he was ‘shocked’ to learn that he was a human and not in fact an alien during a trip to the doctor when he was younger.
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He told Rampstyle magazine: ‘My father told me he felt like he had to introduce himself to me because I was such an alien.
‘I was shocked the day I went to the doctor’s office as a child and I found out that I had normal organs and a normal skeleton because I was certain I was from another planet.’
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