Cage Sheds The Craziness, Not The Quirks

LOS ANGELES - Nicolas Cage lives in a fabulously fake, unabashedly new old castle - with turrets, yet - at the scenic tip of one of Hollywood's less ostentatiously chichi hills. "I got a really good price on it," he offers absurdly. "Nobody wants to live in a castle."

The living room walls are heavy with maroon brocade, and a gigantic stuffed black bug, reputed to have been used in an "Outer Limits" episode ("so I had to have it") dangles from a corner over his shoulder. Parrots are making wild jungle squawks from another room, and gargoyles are just about everywhere. The man has style. He calls it "Gothic hot rod."

And that sounds right. "Would you have expected this from me?" he asks, enjoying the effect of his domain. "Did you see something a little more black lacquer? High-tech? Neo-modern?" Lest we think him seriously concerned, he cries out, "Don't judge me! Don't judge me!" - then extends the tour to the tiger-print bedroom with the laminated cockroach in the headboard.

At 30, Cage has been letting movie audiences judge him for nearly half his life. He first appeared onscreen as the sensitive punk-hunk in "Valley Girl" (1983), emerging shirtless on the beach and mumbling, "Whaaat, I don't want to go to the Valley, I'm not in the mood to go to the Valley."

Prolific and peculiar

It may not have been Brando calling "Stella!" but the debut kicked off a prolific and peculiar career full of edgy, often dangerous characters with an unexpected romantic streak and decency trapped behind their eyes. Think Elvis and James Stewart in one long, loopy package, probably with adenoids.

This time, however, he's positively decency unchained in "It Could Happen to You," the Andrew Bergman romantic comedy-fable that opens tomorrow. Cage plays Charlie, a good old-fashioned beat cop in New York City who, short of money for a tip at the neighborhood coffee shop, promises the waitress (Bridget Fonda) half his lottery ticket. Naturally, he wins $4 million and, because "a promise is a promise," hands $2 million over to her.

"Yes, this is the Jimmy Stewart movie," agrees Cage, adding that Bergman kept directing him to "make it more `Jimmy' . . . But I'm such a huge admirer - he's such an American icon - that I'd hesitate to say I was impersonating him. It was really more of a tip of the hat, kind of an homage, you know. I do think he had what seemed to be a pure American innocence, which trembled on the screen in a way that gave people hope. And there isn't a lot of that right now in movies."

In fact, Cage had done "so many subversive and twisted characters on the darker side of things" that he himself decided a few years ago to lighten up. "I know this sounds like a cliche and kind of romantic," he says, "but I'm 30 now and a parent . . . " (Weston, 3, mostly lives with his mother, actress Kristina Fulton; Cage, who shares custody, lives with model Kristen Zang.)

"I suddenly became worried about my community. I don't want anything to happen to people I love. Even when I was making "Wild at Heart" (David Lynch's rhapsodic outlaw sonnet, 1990), I was still a very sort of rebellious young man. Now I feel myself slowing down into a worrywart about society . . . Yeah," - he smiles at the adult predicament with a combination of earnestness and irony - "I'm a member of the club now.

`Am I being pretentious?'

"I remember I saw Jim Morrison in an old TV interview once, and he was really drugged up on something, but he said, `I haven't done a song yet that has conveyed pure happiness.' And I looked at him and thought, `You know what? You were great but you hadn't done that - and you could be really pretentious.' And then I thought, `Am I being pretentious? Is it pretentious to be always brooding, always that upset and angry guy?' So it was a turning point. I had neglected comedy for a long time. I knew I could be funny, but I didn't want to be funny. I wanted to be James Dean."

The result was what he calls his "sunshine trilogy" - Bergman's "Honeymoon in Vegas," then "Guarding Tess," and now this almost mythic style piece.

And this trio doesn't even include his too-honest-to-lie drifter in "Red Rock West," the noir thriller recently rescued from the video gulag for general release, nor his reluctant bank robber at Christmas in the upcoming "It Happened in Paradise," with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz.

"Nick makes ordinary guys so interesting," marvels Bergman, who is similarly drawn to everyday characters trapped in extraordinary situations. "There's nothing white bread about anything he does."

Cage is tempted to do theater - Lincoln Center's Bernard Gersten is a family friend who has expressed interest, and Cage has mentioned Eugene O'Neill - but "I'm really a film actor. I want a permanent record. I want to be there forever."