It was recently announced that the long-running HBO series True Detective will be returning for a fifth season, with yet another cast full of unexpected A-listers. While earlier seasons of the series featured the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Vince Vaughn, Mahershala Ali, and Jodie Foster, the new season is carrying on the tradition of starting fresh with a new batch of characters. And this time, the cast will be led by the dynamic duo of Antonio Banderas and Nicolas Cage.
Banderas is an incredible get, and it's wonderful to consider what kind of work the actor could do on the series in a post-Tony world, but the truly surprising inclusion there is, of course, Cage himself. Prior to this year, Cage had actually never appeared in a television show. He had solely devoted himself to the medium of film but swayed when the opportunity of Prime Video’s Spider-Noir came calling. Now, he’s fortifying his relationship to prestige TV with True Detective, and while it may surprise some, it makes a great deal of sense. Because surprisingly, television is kind of an ideal medium for Nicolas Cage as a performer.
The reason that Cage caved and agreed to be a part of the Spider-Noir series was a confluence of different factors. For one, he was already emotionally invested in the part, having played a variation of that same character in the 2018 animated film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which featured much of the same creative team behind it. In addition to this, Cage has revealed recently that he really pushed for the series to wholesale embrace his noir influences and that his encouragement was a vital part of why the series was released in black-and-white. It’s not exactly hard to see Cage getting excited about doing something as off-kilter as a Maltese Falcon-inspired series that just happens to center on a bunch of Spider-Man characters, so that all tracks.
However, Cage also recently revealed that at least part of the reason why Spider-Noir won’t be getting additional seasons is because he declined to sign off on waivers relating to AI usage by Amazon for the show, referring to the streamer as “AI-friendly” and referring to himself as “not an AI-friendly actor.”
But given that Cage has now signed on to star in the new season of True Detective, it is clear that something beneficial came out of this whole process: Cage realized what a great fit television is for his gifts.
If you happen to be unfamiliar with Cage’s onscreen work, for the better part of five decades now, the actor has been delivering unconventional, surprising, and often deeply affecting performances. While there are many adjectives one can use to describe Nicolas Cage as an actor, banal is certainly not one of them. He is a performer who takes massive swings anytime he steps up to the plate, and that’s precisely why television could prove to be a perfect fit for him.
In film, when a project knows how to properly utilize Nicolas Cage, the results are often sublime. For a recent example of this, you need to look no further than something like Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, a gnarly cosmic horror film that perfectly accentuates everything that works so remarkably well about Cage’s unique performance style. But when trapped within the confines of a lesser film, even when his performance may be interesting, it doesn’t always work. In television, Cage gets more opportunities to take these kinds of big swings with the same character and flesh out all of the various eccentricities pertaining to the role.
A great example of how this allows Cage’s long-standing approach to flourish rather than flounder is actually found in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. In that film, Cage plays the central antagonist but is only onscreen for a matter of minutes in total. Despite this, Cage spent months upon months preparing the character, building an elaborate backstory for himself, and more. So much so that Perkins and Cage are now working on a prequel to utilize more of Cage’s input. In a TV series like True Detective, the sum total of the actor’s work can be exhibited within a single season, and the resulting cumulative payoff has the potential to be extremely satisfying.
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