Nicolas Cage has said he came close to death while learning to surf for his new film, The Surfer.
The 61-year-old Oscar-winning actor plays a man who revisits his childhood beach with his son only to be humiliated by locals in the new film from director Lorcan Finnegan.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Cage acknowledged that learning to surf for the role had been a challenge and jokingly complained that paparazzi only photographed his training while he was falling off: “They didn’t get the one shot of me standing on the board!”
The film was shot in Yallingup, in Western Australia, where conditions could be treacherous. “We had things like weather conditions and believe it or not, shark reports and things, all that s***,” said Cage.
Recalling his previous attempts at surfing, Cage admitted: “I have surfed, but every time I’ve attempted surfing, I’ve been pounded to smithereens. I surfed down on Sunset Beach. When I was trying to learn, my teacher gave me a shortboard. I said, ‘Look, I want a longboard.'”
That didn’t help him when he got out on the water. “I just got pounded and literally got stuck in the rip tide, and they said they saw my board, they call it ‘tombstone,’ like that triangle top,” said Cage. “I’m climbing up the leash as I’m somersaulting, and I could have died.”
Cage added that the experience put him off surfing, saying: “Now I have a young kid, I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.”
Writing for The Independent, film critic Xan Brooks said: “The Surfer is a wild, rocky, beach-bound B-movie that pits a hapless, frazzled loner against a band of local bullies. The loner wants to ride the big waves and make a new home on the coast, but he’s been confined to the car park and is slowly losing his mind.
“‘Before you surf you must suffer,’ he is told by the bullies, just at the point when his holiday goes to hell. Soon he’s drinking out of puddles and eating out of bins. He’s bitten by a rat and crapped on by a parrot. The man’s both a joke and a danger, a victim and a hero. Is it irrelevant to mention that he’s played by Nicolas Cage?
“Conceivably there are other actors who could have starred in The Surfer, Lorcan Finnegan’s wonderfully punch-drunk new thriller, and these might have fit more neatly with the tale. The Surfer is set in Western Australia and the hero himself is a local boy. This means that the script has to perform several ungainly pivots in order to justify Cage’s presence. ‘I thought you were American,’ remarks a passing photographer, which provides the cue for the actor to explain that he has actually spent years in California and now wants to move back to his old family home on the cliff.
“Cage, like Connery and Schwarzenegger, rarely bothers with accents and tends to burst out of each role like the Incredible Hulk in a wetsuit. No script can restrain him; he has to be who he is. The Surfer accepts this and makes the necessary adjustments. The hero, it turns out, is never even named. He’s Nicolas Cage with a surfboard: this is the film’s USP.”
