10 Actors Who Scared Themselves
2. Nicolas Cage's Break With Reality - Face/Off
There are few actors bolder or more experimental than Nicolas Cage, who has clearly relished tackling strange and ambitious roles throughout his career, perhaps none more popularly than as homicidal maniac Castor Troy - and John Travolta's Sean Archer wearing Troy's face - in John Woo's Face/Off.
As fearless as Cage has proven himself to be over the decades, though, even he has his limits, and pushed up against the boundaries of his own fear while filming the scene where Archer-as-Troy is in jail and screaming at his fellow inmates. Cage said:
"That was the scene in the jail cell where - god, it's such a trippy movie - where Sean Archer is pretending he's Castor Troy and so it was so… cubist... And I remember I was like, 'I'm Castor Troy!' And it went on and on, almost like a riot... There was a moment in there where I think I actually left my body. I got scared, am I acting or is this real? I can see it if I look at the movie, that one moment, it's in my eyes."
Nic Cage losing sense of himself in a movie about swapped identities might be the most Nic Cage thing ever, and we love him for it.