Moonstruck

The following is an excerpt from How Coppola Became Cage by Zach Schonfeld. Copyright © 2023 by Zach Schonfeld and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

In footage from the rehearsal sessions for Moonstruck, Nicolas Cage sits across from Cher in a leather jacket, his hair spiked up haphazardly like he just stumbled in from a Sex Pistols audition. He is surrounded by actors old enough to be his parents. He looks categorically out of place, though isn’t that the idea? 

Would Moonstruck have worked if Ronny weren’t such a live-wire threat to Loretta’s complacency?

“Nick always looked like he’d been shot out of a cannon,” says the film’s writer, John Patrick Shanley. “He almost looked like a cartoon character. Incredibly handsome. But there was something larger than life about him—and also about the kinds of characters I was writing.”

Cage didn’t want to be there. Like Cher, he had not wanted to do Moonstruck. “I was angry and rebellious,” he said in 1992. “I wanted to make the kind of movies that are essentially punk gestures. I read the screenplay to Moonstruck and thought, ‘I would never pay money to see this film!’ But my agent insisted I do it, practically forced me to do it.”

In 1986, Cage wanted to be dangerous; Moonstruck must have seemed about as dangerous as the Metropolitan Opera House. He was more enamored with the considerably darker Vampire’s Kiss, which was already floating around the ether and which his agent, Ed Limato, had all but forbade him from doing. “He said: ‘No, you’re not going to wear those stupid plastic things. I want you to look handsome! Do Moonstruck!’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do Moonstruck!’ I wanted to be punk rock,” Cage recalled in 2021.

Cage proposed a compromise: if he did Moonstruck, would Limato let him do Vampire’s Kiss right after? The deal was made.

Cage’s antipathy toward Moonstruck was revealing: it crystallized the desire he felt to separate himself from mainstream Hollywood nearly as soon as such roles became available to him. Cage did not want to be a heartthrob, did not want to be a leading man, did not want to follow in the footsteps of Rob Lowe or Judge Reinhold or other comedy-adjacent stars with whom he had competed for roles. Cage’s attitude was rebellious and often petulant, but this stubbornness propelled him into the most daring and unpredictable stretch of his career. 

The irony is that Cage’s character in Moonstruck was anything but anodyne. There are no villains in Moonstruck, but Ronny is the film’s darkest character by far—a son who doesn’t love his mother, a man so consumed by anger that he won’t attend his big brother’s wedding—played by Cage with a vocabulary of withering glances and explosive outbursts. In this sense, Ronny is a distant ancestor of later Cage characters like Roy from Matchstick Men or Robin from Pig, broken men who have already withdrawn from society, shattered by all- consuming tragedies in their pasts, long before we meet them.

But what ultimately got Cage interested in the Moonstruck character was something small: the wooden hand. Ronny, we learn, lost his real hand five years earlier in an accident, which he blames on his brother, Johnny (Danny Aiello), who distracted him while he was using a bread slicer. All this hurt comes tumbling out the first time he meets Loretta, sweating next to the ovens in that medieval basement.

Cage has a certain fascination with portraying physical deformities. It is embedded in his namesake—Luke Cage, the Marvel character, gained his superhuman strength as the result of a botched science experiment. Cage is often drawn to characters with unique deformities of their own: the bandaged face in Birdy, the freakish nose in Never on Tuesday, the whole ludicrous conceit of Face/ Off. Sometimes he chooses roles for this reason alone. Maybe the challenge lies in interpreting and conveying the psychological weight of a physical disfigurement.

So it was with Moonstruck. “I took Moonstruck because the character was so romantic and I’m romantic,” he claimed to SPIN in 1989. “I thought it was great that a man with a deformity could be that confident with a woman. Someday, I’d like to play a romantic lead whose face is covered with scars.”

Yet if Moonstruck is Cage’s most purely romantic film, the secret ingredient was his own romantic baggage, feeding his performance from some half-conscious realm. At the time, Cage was reeling from a breakup with his girlfriend of several years, actress Jenny Wright, with whom he lived in 1985 and 1986. When he filmed the indelible late-night soliloquy—in which Ronny passionately implores Loretta to embrace the intrinsic messiness of love and “get in my bed!”—Cage was thinking about Wright, imbuing the breathless Shanley dialogue with the weight of his own heartbreak.

This scene encapsulates Moonstruck’s core thesis: a treatise on love’s destructive yet insurmountable trance. “Love don’t make things nice,” Ronny tells Loretta after their date to the opera. “It ruins everything! It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess.” Secretly, Cage imagined Wright might hear his pleading, might be turned on by how handsome he looked, gleaming in the moonlight in an expensive tux. “It was like a love letter in a way,” Cage reflected in 1990. “I was hoping she would be out there listening.”

In his odd way, Cage was putting a personal spin on Lee Strasberg’s Method technique of “affective memory,” in which actors use memories and emotions from their own lives as psychological seedling for a performance. It was one of many qualities Cage had in common with his idol, Marlon Brando.

Like Cage, Brando—once the living embodiment of Method acting—used acting to exorcise his inner turmoil; like Cage, Brando had a way of channeling emotions from his traumatic childhood and personal life as fuel for his greatest performances. “The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you’re working on,” Brando once said. “You learn to dig into your unconscious.”

Cage’s conflicted relationship with the Method, his knack for embodying torment, his proclivity for being a character actor even after achieving leading- man stardom—all of this called to mind Brando. “There’s something of Brando in the way Cage confronts Cher in Moonstruck, wearing a soiled white t-shirt, radiating heartbreaking masculine pathos,” the critic Manohla Dargis argued in a 1995 essay about Cage. Dargis continued:

There’s something of Brando as well in the way Cage fully uses his body, now and then, to punishing effect. An important characteristic of Cage’s performance style is that he charts the life rolling around inside with his entire physical being. His body tells secrets.

Cage later revealed that he was thinking of one of Brando’s signature performances, On the Waterfront, when he made Moonstruck. It’s a curious obscurity of Cage’s career that he nearly worked with the director who made that film—indeed, the director who made Brando a star and who first brought the Method to a popular audience—Elia Kazan. “I got a call from Elia Kazan after he saw [Moonstruck] and he wanted me to do the sequel to America America and play Stavros,” Cage said in a 2018 interview, referring to the hero of Kazan’s 1963 immigrant epic.

The movie never happened. Nor did Cage’s ploy to win back his ex-girlfriend succeed, but his passion endeared him to Cher, who found him at once brilliant and maddening. Cage, in turn, found Cher to be so youthful that he barely felt an age difference.

One day, Shanley recalls, during rehearsals, Cage turned to Cher and opened his mouth to show off a half-chewed bite of sandwich. “And Cher just looked at him like, ‘Oh, don’t be a brat,’” Shanley says. Other times, Cher made lunch for Cage at her apartment in New York. During one of these lunches, he asked Cher if she was a witch. “He was into that stuff,” Cher recalled in 1996. “So I said, ‘I am.’ He said, ‘I thought so.’”

This was a strange couple for moviegoers to take in, but their onscreen chemistry was palpable. Cage’s ranting and raving formed the perfect counterpoint to Cher’s exasperated, hand-wringing pragmatism, and he paired it with an illicit swagger primed to melt her defenses. (Just watch the way he pauses to stroke his hair back after flipping the table over just before their first kiss.) Both actors approached the film with a fearless ferocity, a willingness to sweat and shout and breathe genuine urgency into dialogue that may have looked silly on the page.

Cher came away from the film with deep respect for Cage, but doubt that such an eccentric actor could ever be a mainstream star. “He takes unbelievable chances and personally I think he’s crazy—sometimes he was a blast on the set, other days I’d get real peeved at him,” Cher told an interviewer shortly after the movie opened. “And of course, he’s got those great eyes. Every time I got angry with him, I’d just look in his eyes.”