‘Longlegs’ star Nicolas Cage breaks down ‘androgynous’ transformation

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Longlegs.

Nicolas Cage shares a vivid memory of his mother, the late Joy Vogelsang, that still sticks with him to this day.

“My mom put on Noxzema cold cream. I was 2 years old, and I opened the bathroom door [to see] what she was doing,” Cage recalls in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “For no reason, she turned her face really fast and stared at me after [putting on] the cold cream. The whiteness of the cold cream just really spooked me.”

Years later, while preparing for his role in Longlegs, the new film from Osgood Perkins playing now in theaters, the actor, 60, used this childhood moment as inspiration. As part of his transformation into the elusive Satanic serial killer, the crew applied prosthetics and a stark white complexion to alter his appearance. “He has a strange connection to the color white,” Cage notes of his character. “I don’t really know what it is. He says it’s just a force he’s aware of. You don’t question it too much. He knows it when he sees it.”

Cage continued to use his mother, who lived with schizophrenia and severe depression throughout her life, as a focal point for his unsettling performance. He previously told EW, “I was coming at it from, what exactly was it that drove my mother insane? It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through. She would talk in terms that were kind of poetry. I didn’t know how else to describe it. I tried to put that in the Longlegs character because he’s really a tragic entity. He’s at the mercy of these voices that are talking to him and getting him to do these things.”

The film follows F.B.I. Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who has an unexplainably high level of perception that some might say verges on the supernatural. After sussing out the location of a perp while on the job, she’s given the more difficult task of apprehending the Longlegs killer, who leaves behind coded messages at every crime scene.

For a good chunk of the film, cinematographer Andres Arochi doesn’t shoot Longlegs directly on; instead, sneaking peeks at him through reflections or from odd angles. It’s meant, as Perkins explained, to reflect how the killer lurks outside of Harker’s consciousness: “He’s there, but he’s totally not there, but he’s totally there.”

Harker finally tracks down the man behind the killer, Dan Ferdinand Cobble, a Satan worshipper and doll maker who targets families with a 9-year-old daughter born on a specific day. He delivers possessed dolls to these families, and through the dolls, the Devil works his magic by forcing the father to murder his loved ones and then himself. In a twist of fate, we learn Harker had a close call with Cobble when she was 9 and nearly became one of his victims, though she blocked it from her mind. However, her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), struck a deal with Cobble: to spare Harker’s life, she would deliver the dolls to the families for him under the guise of a nun to divert suspicion.

When audiences finally get a good look at Cobble full on, Cage’s face is barely recognizable underneath the white makeup, bloated prosthetics, and wild hair. He’s an odd character, often mumbling to himself and, even more frequently, singing tunes or Biblical warnings to himself in crazed tones that crescendo until he’s screaming at no one in particular.

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“I see Longlegs as neither male nor female,” Cage explains. “The character is very androgynous, and I often thought of, believe it or not, the hermaphrodite in the [Federico] Fellini movie Juliet and the Spirits. When the prophet was talking, she was saying, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’ to [Giulietta] Masina’s character and going through all those really bizarre vocal shrieks and whatnot. Oz came to the table and said, ‘Why don’t you plump your hair in this shot?’ I thought, ‘That’s fantastic, man. Let’s do that.’ And then I took it a little further and said, ‘Do you find me beautiful?’ He didn’t put that in the movie, but I wanted that. I wanted Longlegs to be a character that wanted to be perceived as very beautiful.”

Cage began preparing for the role on Christmas morning in 2022 before heading up to shoot in Vancouver at the start of the new year. “I started memorizing my dialogue and trying to find a way into it,” he says of that lead time. “I kept going over it and over it. By the time I got to Canada, I was shooting rehearsals on my cell phone and trying to find the moves and the rhythms and melodies of the Longlegs character so that by the time I got on set, it was so dialed in and became almost like performing a song or a bit of music.”

He didn’t socialize, however, with his costar, Monroe. He thinks it may have been intentional on Perkins’ part. When Harker and Cobble finally get in a room together for the first time at the end of the film, it’s like exposure therapy without the therapy — she finally comes face to face with the thing that has been peripherally stalking her for years. Cage fully unleashes in this moment that builds until Cobble kills himself by smashing his face over and over against the interrogation table.

“That scene, for me, was the explosive scene in the script and the reason why I wanted to make the movie,” Cage says. “I was filled with anticipation the whole time I was shooting to get to that scene. I am a fan of Maika. I like her commitment to the genre. It Follows was the first movie I’d seen her in, which was one of my favorite movies ever in the genre. So I went into it as a fan.”

That’s yet another connection to Cobble. “I think it’s not that far from how Longlegs feels about [Harker],” he continues. “He sees her as a hero of sorts.”