In footage from the rehearsal sessions for Moonstruck, Nicolas Cage sits across from Cher in a leather jacket, his hair spiked up haphazardly like he just stumbled in from a Sex Pistols audition. He is surrounded by actors old enough to be his parents. He looks categorically out of place, though isn’t that the idea?
Would Moonstruck have worked if Ronny weren’t such a live-wire threat to Loretta’s complacency?
“Nick always looked like he’d been shot out of a cannon,” says the film’s writer, John Patrick Shanley. “He almost looked like a cartoon character. Incredibly handsome. But there was something larger than life about him—and also about the kinds of characters I was writing.”
Cage didn’t want to be there. Like Cher, he had not wanted to do Moonstruck. “I was angry and rebellious,” he said in 1992. “I wanted to make the kind of movies that are essentially punk gestures. I read the screenplay to Moonstruck and thought, ‘I would never pay money to see this film!’ But my agent insisted I do it, practically forced me to do it.”
Read Full Article »