Perhaps the most unsurprising thing about Pedro Pascal is the fact that he’s a Nicolas Cage fan. Makes sense, honestly, with Cage being quite the heartthrob himself during his heyday. What about Pascal’s favorite Cage movies? We have an answer to that as well.
In an appearance on the incredibly popular YouTube show Hot Ones, Pascal revealed his choices in between bouts of suffering from eating wings doused in hot sauces.
“I know that you were a fan of Nicolas Cage long before you starred alongside him,” host Sean Evans observed about The Mandalorian star. “Do you have a Mount Rushmore of Nicolas Cage movies? I can throw some at you.”
Pascal was playfully offended at the suggestion. “No, no, you don’t have to throw any at me,” he said with a laugh. “The earlier ones for me because of how impressionable they are. But Raising Arizona, Peggy Sue Got Married, Face/Off, [and] I got a soft spot for Moonstruck, man.”
As for that movie, Pascal said, “It isn’t even about having a big swing in terms of performance. It is actually highly, highly intelligent choice-making in his acting. Where I’m going to do a Fritz Lang hand thing in the moment where I scream about my brother Daniel Aiello accidentally chopping his hand off.”
He called that moment a “perfect effect” where everything is grounded in the scene, and despite the theatrics, it’s “still believable.” Pascal said it was incredible to get to do homework for that movie and rewatch all of his movies “that I’d already seen so many times.”
He’s not done. Pascal then brings up Cage’s performance in Adaptation, calling it one of the best screen performances “in the history of American cinema,” which, let’s be honest, is pretty high praise coming from Pascal. However, he said, “The four that I mentioned have a personal place in my development as an aspiring actor.”
Many times, he explained, he’ll be in a scene and “doing something or saying something” he realizes he got from some Cage performance over the years. It’s actually really refreshing to see Pascal be so open about his influences.
Pascal plays a Cage superfan in the 2022 movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which is pretty hilarious because he seems like a superfan in real life. It feels very serendipitous. The whole episode of Hot Ones is worth a watch, as Pascal is open, relaxed, and very funny during the whole thing. Check it out below (the Cage talk starts around 13:15).