Nicolas Cage recently had a near-death experience.
While filming for his latest role in “The Surfer,” the 61-year-old actor revealed he “got pounded to smithereens” while practicing his surfing skills: a stunt, he said, that could’ve killed him.
“I have surfed, but every time I’ve attempted surfing, I’ve been pounded to smithereens,” Cage, who plays a businessman who returns to Australia in hopes of buying his childhood beach house, told Entertainment Weekly. “I surfed down on Sunset Beach. When I was trying to learn, my teacher gave me a short board. I said, ‘Look, I want a long board.'”
“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,” he continued, describing a situation in which the tip of his board stuck out of the water.
“I’m climbing up the leash as I’m somersaulting, and I could have died,” he continued. “Now I have a young kid, I don’t know if I want to do it anymore.”
Not long ago, Cage, whose impressive career spans over four decades, expressed his desire to possibly retire.
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“I feel that I’ve, at this point, after 45 years of doing this, that in over 100 movies, I feel I’ve pretty much said what I’ve had to say with cinema. And I’d like to leave on a high note and say adios,” Cage told Uproxx in 2023.
“I think I have to do maybe three or four more movies before I can get there and then hopefully switch formats and go into some other way of expressing my acting.”
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“I would’ve liked to have left on a high note, like ‘Dream Scenario.’ But I have other contracts that I have to fulfill, so we’ll see what happens,” he continued. “I am going to be very severe and very [stringent] on the selection process moving forward. But for me to do another movie, I do want to explore other formats.”
His end goal?
“The goal is to retire, surf, drink red wine and eat spaghetti,” he told EW.
