Nicolas Cage never wants to retire and that’s just fine with us

Although some people give Nicolas Cage some good-natured shit for the movies he’s appeared in (myself included), it’s hard to imagine a world without Nicolas Cage giving us his particular brand of crazy each and every year – and thankfully, we won’t have to.

While speaking with Entertainment Weekly about his upcoming film Prisoners of Ghostland, Nicolas Cage discussed needing to stay interested in his craft, which gets more difficult as the years go on.

At my age, the job that I have is to stay interested, because if I’m not interested, you’re not going to be interested. It gets more difficult the older we get. So I have to find new ways of expressing myself, new challenges. But I do think, God willing, that once I finish the next two movies, I’m going to take some time off, because I think it’s time to recharge.

Fear not! Nicolas Cage was quick to explain that he can’t imagine himself ever retiring. “No, no, no. No, no. That can’t happen,” Cage said. “To do what I do in cinema has been like a guardian angel for me, and I need it. I’m healthier when I’m working, I need a positive place to express my life experience, and filmmaking has given me that. So I’m never going to retire.” Cage went on to say that his argument with people who claim he works too much is simply that he likes it and that it’s healthy for him. “I’m happy when I’m working,” Cage said, “and by the way, guys like Cagney and Bogart, they were doing hundreds of movies.’ And then I went, ‘I’d better check that,’ and I went, ‘Oops.’ [Laughs] Jerry Lewis was one of my friends, and he and I would go and have dinner together, and he would say, ‘How many movies you got?’ I go, ‘I got about 100, how many you got?’ ‘I got 40. So you got twice as much as me?’ ‘Well, I didn’t know that, Jerry.’“

Recent years have seen Nicolas Cage diving into some interesting work once again, such as Mandy, Colour Out of Space, and Pig, the latter of which has earned the actor rave reviews. The actor’s next film, Prisoners of Ghostland, will be released in select theaters and on VOD tomorrow.