SPOILER ALERT: This story contains light spoilers about “Longlegs,” now playing in theaters.
Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe are the stars of the serial killer movie “Longlegs,” yet the duo rarely share the screen — except for one key interrogation scene near the end. Director Oz Perkins had a unique strategy to ratchet up the tension on set, which was to keep the pair away from each other during the duration of filming until their onscreen meeting.
“The whole lead-up to that was crazy,” Monroe said. “They had been filming with Cage for five days at that point, and it was his last day, probably three weeks into filming. The director chose to not have me see anything, not meet him, not see what his face looked like. He created this character, this thing, so I was so nervous.
“The PAs bring me up to this door that enters into the room where he is,” she continued. “The cameras start rolling on me and the director calls ‘action.’ I opened the door and what you see is all very real, and it was incredible. He’s unrecognizable, and so I didn’t feel like I was in a room with Nic Cage. I was in a room with Longlegs. After we finished that scene, he was done. He’s in this method world, but he was able to let go of it. We’re sitting across from each other and he leans over, in his full look and everything, and says, ‘Oh, I’m such a big fan of you.’”
Cage expanded on his admiration for Monroe in a recent interview with Variety, saying her first major role caught his attention.
“I wanted to follow her after ‘It Follows,’” he said. “Especially the first opening scenes when she’s tied into that wheelchair, getting pushed around. I felt terrible for her, and she just kept it through the whole movie. It’s a different energy than other actors have. It’s what makes it uniquely her, and her own thing is that Maika has a personality and energy that separates her from everybody else. She’s not like anybody else, and that’s a big compliment.”
Cage also discussed the intensity of their scene together.
“it was important to us, me and the director, that Maika and I not spend a lot of time together socially,’ Cage said. “He wanted the scene to be a surprise for both of us, which I thought was sage direction. I came into it a fan, and I told her as much because I had been following her work and she was very nice. We only had maybe two or three lines to one another that weren’t dialogue, just conversing briefly.
“My feeling about Maika is that she’s effortless,” he continued. “I think there is an ease to her performance style where I don’t see any acting. I find it to have a childlike charm, which is compelling, especially when you consider that she’s playing Lee Harker, who is a young lady who essentially had her childhood robbed from her, but she has this inherent kind of childlike grace, vulnerability and charm. You care about her immediately, about the character she’s playing, and I think you care about Maika. I don’t know her well at all, I don’t know her history, I don’t know her background. I just know her as a fan of watching her movies, and she’s able to do the most difficult kind of acting, which is that you don’t see any acting.”
Perkins said he was happy to let Cage approach the role in any way he saw fit.
“You get Nic Cage in your movie, and it’s like all of a sudden you have a tiger,” he said. “You’re not like, ‘Hey, Tiger, I think you should do this this way’ or ‘Hey, Tiger, I think you should move like this’ or ‘Hey, Tiger, I think this should be what you want to eat.’ There’s such a power that comes with someone who’s such a titan of the industry and one of the greatest all-time movie stars ever. When you have an entity like him, you want to let him do what he’s going to do. You want to talk to him about it and help him and answer questions and say something if you see something.
“But he made it clear early on, in a very friendly way, that he wasn’t hanging out, he wasn’t going to meet people,” Perkins continued. “It wasn’t that he was method — I mean, he spoke to me between cuts, between takes. He was himself, I was talking to Nick. That said, his focus is extremely good. He’s not socializing, he’s not meeting people for dinner, he’s not hanging out, he’s not chitchatting, he’s not shaking hands. I had plenty of access to Nick — it’s just that I was the only one who had that access. And it worked to my advantage in the sense that I could keep him away from Maika and then have them only be together in the one scene they had.”
Read more about Monroe’s experience filming “Longlegs” in Variety‘s exclusive interview and photo shoot.
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