At long last, Nicolas Cage finally got to play Superman on the big screen, and his Man of Steel is more than a little snarky.
In the animated comedy "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies" (in theaters now), Superman (voiced by Cage) – along with Wonder Woman (singer Halsey) and Green Lantern (hip-hop star Lil Yachty) – run into the Teen Titans after they've defeated Balloon Man and done a whole musical number. But one Justice Leaguer in particular is dismissive of the youngsters.
“Titans, if you keep playing the fool, you’ll never be seen as real heroes. Only as jokes,” Cage’s Man of Steel says sternly, before getting a rubber chicken thrown in his face. “Somebody save me,” he adds with much exasperation.
“It wasn’t really the version that Tim Burton and I had in mind, but it was just fun,” Cage says about his “Teen Titans” cartoon role while discussing his upcoming horror fantasy “Mandy” (in theaters Sept. 14).
Cage's love for Superman is pretty legendary. He was set to play the superhero in Burton's 1998 "Superman Lives" but the movie was scrapped and never went up, up and away. (It was the subject of a documentary, though.) Cage once owned a copy of "Action Comics" No. 1, Superman's first comic-book appearance in 1938, but later sold it for $2.1 million. And his 12-year-old son Kal-El was named for Superman's Kryptonian birth name.
His Super-gig actually came about because Kal-El is such a fan of the “Teen Titans GO!” animated TV series on the Cartoon Network. (His son got a role in the movie, too, as young Bruce Wayne, aka Batman.)
“It was terrific,” Cage says. “It was just nice to be involved in something my kid loves and we got to do it together.”
Cage has always enjoyed doing voiceover work, from playing a mole (the animal kind) in 2009’s "G-Force" to a lovable cavedad in 2013’s “The Croods,” and calls it “one of the more fun aspects of the business I’m in. You get to really riff and go for it and go off-page and just free associate. You get into the jazz of the character.”
His next animated role is also a different take on a famous comic-book hero: In "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" (out Dec. 14), Cage voices Spider-Man Noir, a 1930s gangster-era Peter Parker from another dimension. "So you think of all those old Bogey movies or Edward G. (Robinson)," Cage says. "I try to voice him with a celebration of those classic and iconic noir Golden Age movie stars."
KIRO
