Nicolas Cage talks about how his mother was inspired by “Longlegs” and created his “very androgynous” serial killer

In the next horror movie Long legs, Nicolas Cage stars a mysterious satanic serial killer who is known by that same title. And although the movie Has been compared to Silence of inocents and ZodiacCage points to his late mother as one of his inspirations for the film.

Cage’s mother, Joy Vogelsang passed away in 2021, and the actor has previously spoken about how he struggled with mental illness for much of his childhood, including times when he was institutionalized and underwent shock treatments.

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At the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Monday, Cage explained that for his character, “It’s the voices, it’s not really him; something else has hijacked him. I’ve often thought about what happened to my mother; if I’m good in this movie, it’s because of my mother. That also gave me a little bit of empathy for the character, as crazy as his situation is and what he’s doing with these effigies.”

In Long legsMaika Monroe plays a new FBI agent assigned to the unsolved case of a serial killer, and discovers a personal connection to the killer as she tries to stop him before he kills more people. In the film’s trailer and marketing, Cage’s appearance is kept largely hidden, save for the high-pitched voice that belongs to his character.

The cage said The Hollywood Reporter who created both his character’s unrecognizable look and voice alongside writer-director Osgood Perkins, and the star said she “called him at 4:30 in the morning on Christmas Day two years ago and gave him clips of me rehearsing the lines.”

For the physical transformation — making Cage very pale and with long blond hair — it was about “finding this very androgynous, his-hers, glam rock look for the character that was important to me, so that he didn’t look anything like me and that I found liberating, that I could talk this way and move this way and talk about these very dark things,” the actor explained. “I wanted the character to be almost an androgynous prophet, like in Fellini’s film.” Juliet of the Spirits.”

Perkins added that for the voice, “We talked about what was the opposite of aggressive. Was there some kind of feminine aspect that was interesting?” Perkins said Cage would go away and “do his homework and bring it to me at the front of the room and I would look it over and if something looked good, I would say okay, if something was a little over the top, I would bring it back. I was just picking it out, I wasn’t telling him what to do.”

Long legs hits theaters on Friday.

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