Superman Fanatic Nicolas Cage Says 'He'd Make a Great Lex Luthor'

"I think my Superman days are long gone," the actor told the 'Guardian' in a new interview, before suggesting he may be better suited to play a villain instead.

October 1, 2018

Nicolas Cage Lex Luthor — Image via Getty/Paul Archuleta
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As much as he’s always dreamed of transforming into Clark Kent, Nicolas Cage has decided to give up on his fantasy of becoming Superman, in favor of settling on the role of Lex Luthor. Do you hear that @ DC Entertainment?

In a new interview with the Guardian, writer Hadley Freeman lets Cage know there’s currently an online campaign to make the actor the next Superman, following Henry Cavill’s departure. Cage replies that his Superman window has closed. “Oh, I think my Superman days are long gone,” he says, before conceding he would make a better villain these days. “Oh, that would be GREAT! I’d make a great Lex Luthor!”

Let us not forget, however, that Cage did once get the role as Superman in Tim Burton’s abandoned Superman Lives project. A documentary about the troubled inner workings behind the doomed project, with footage of Cage suited up as the Man of Steel, came out this summer.

"I would offer that the movie that Tim and I would have made, in your imagination, is more powerful than any of the Superman movies,” Cage told Entertainment Weeklylast year. “I didn’t even have to make the movie and we all know what that movie would have been in your imagination. That is the Superman. That is the movie. Even though you never saw it—it is the Superman."

He’s also taken on the voice of Superman in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, which also debuted in theaters this summer.

To be honest, if anyone deserves to play any role at all in a Superman film, it’s Nicolas Cage. He named his son after the superhero's Kryptonian birth name, Kal-El, and once owned a copy of Superman's debut issue Action Comics No. 1 before selling it for $2 million.