Nicolas Cage is one of the most popular actors of this or any generation, but he also holds a number of surprising records.
There was a time when Cage was one of the most prominent actors in the world, starring in award-winning films and even winning an Oscar. Today, he’s more of a meme for many fans.
Website Stat Significant looked at Cage’s lengthy career and found some interesting stats about the actor, now seemingly in a career resurgence after roles in Pig, Longlegs, and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
For starters, it was found that Cage had an incredible number of roles to his name. Among actors with over $1 billion in lifetime box office gross who starred in leading roles, Cage is by far the most prolific, with just shy of 90 roles.
He blows past the next actor on the list, Jackie Chan, who sits at around 70 roles. Stat Significant attributes this to Cage’s many appearances in low-budget and direct-to-video films, allegedly taken on because of massive debts accrued in the early 2000s.
Cage made headlines over the years with a number of extravagant and wild purchases, including a dinosaur skull, a near-mint copy of Action Comics #1, and a tomb. He also admitted in a 2003 interview with 60 Minutes he had taken roles after losing $6 million due to the real estate crash.
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Stat Significant also discovered Cage had a wildly popular AMA, which was held to promote The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage played a fictionalized version of himself. Reddit says the AMA had 240,000 upvotes.
Compare that to Barack Obama’s 2012 Reddit AMA. Obama was the then-sitting President of the U.S. and held the AMA as part of his re-election campaign, but it topped out at 216,000 upvotes.
It’s a remarkable amount of data that supports just how prolific of an actor Cage is, even after years in less-than-stellar films. With his fortunes beginning to turn after the success of movies like Longlegs, it all seems to point to Cage entering into a renaissance.
If you’re looking for more Nicolas Cage, read all about the odds of a Longlegs 2, how to watch Longlegs, the meaning behind Longlegs’ nickname, and five horror movies you should watch next.