Nicholas Cage has recently made a change to his real name on records. The actor whose real name is Nicolas Kim Coppola, has now revealed that he chose to keep his stage name as his legal name last year.
In an interview with Variety, Cage said he would rather be the patriarch of his own family than the “clown cousin” of Hollywood royalty.
"I'm Nick Cage in life, and I'm Nick Cage on camera. It is better to be the patriarch of my own little family than the clown cousin on the margins of someone else's, so I decided I'm going to bring it on and be Cage," he said.
Interestingly, the actor had the idea of using Cage to his last name from the Marvel Comics character Luke Cage. His family also often talked about the famous avant-garde artist John Cage. Despite having the "short and sweet" name he wanted, Nicolas admits being frustrated about his name being misspelt.
"I thought, well, I'll keep the name ‘Nicolas' because my father named me Nicolas — with French spelling, which has always frustrated me, because everyone adds an ‘h'," Cage explained. "I don't know why he gave me the French spelling! But he did," he remarked, noting how he doesn't care if people call him "Nick" or "Nicolas."
For the uninitiated, Cage is the son of the late August Coppola, the older brother of Francis Ford Coppola and Talia Shire. Other famous members of the Coppola family include Francis' daughter, Sofia Coppola, and Shire's son, Jason Schwartzman.
Cage can be seen in the recently-released Prime Video series Spider-Noir in which the actor plays Ben Reilly/The Spider, a character he voiced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Inspired from the eponymous comic book series, the show also stars Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, Karen Rodriguez, Abraham Popoola, Jack Huston and Brendan Gleeson.
