Nicolas Cage leads the new thriller The Surfer, in theaters now
Early “attempted surfing,” he said in a recent interview, resulted in the actor getting “pounded to smithereens”
Paparazzi photographing Cage training for his movie “didn’t get one shot of me standing on the board,” he joked
According to Nicolas Cage, surfing isn’t for the faint of heart.
Although his new movie The Surfer (in theaters now) doesn’t feature the 61-year-old star hanging ten on screen, Cage told Entertainment Weekly in a May 3 interview that he’s “been pounded to smithereens” many of the times he’s attempted the sport.
“I’m climbing up the leash as I’m somersaulting, and I could have died,” he recalled of early efforts at California’s Sunset Beach. “I just got pounded and literally got stuck in the rip tide, and [teachers] said they saw my board, they call it ‘tombstone,’ like that triangle top,” he said, indicating the tip of his surfboard sticking up out of the water.
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Of his two-year-old daughter August Francesca Coppola Cage, who the Oscar winner shares with wife Riko Shibata, he added, “Now I have a young kid, I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.”
Eric Charbonneau/Roadside Attractions via Getty
Nicolas Cage at a Los Angeles screening of ‘The Surfer’ on April 30
Still, his “goal” is still the laidback surfing lifestyle: “retire, surf, drink red wine, and eat spaghetti.”
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The Surfer, from director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin, is a “psychological thriller” about Cage’s unnamed character returning the idyllic Australian “beach of his childhood to surf with his son,” per an official synopsis.
“But his desire to hit the waves is thwarted by a group of locals whose mantra is ‘don’t live here, don’t surf here,’” it continues. “Humiliated and angry, the man is drawn into a conflict that keeps rising in concert with the punishing heat of the summer and pushes him to his breaking point.”
courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Nicolas Cage and Julian McMahon in ‘The Surfer’
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While Cage “loves the way the movie ends” and “wouldn’t change a frame,” he told EW that he and director Finnegan discussed the possibility of him elegantly riding waves at the end of The Surfer, much like 1979’s Big Wednesday. “Lorcan and I talked at length about it. He knows that I wish I could have gotten to that point.”
Training for the movie on a longboard, he added, paparazzi captured only shots of him wiping out. “They didn’t get the one shot of me standing on the board,” he quipped.
The Surfer, costarring Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand and Justin Rosniak, is in theaters now.
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