tThere are numerous sliding door moments in Hollywood that, if they had actually happened, would have fractured the space-time continuum like a DeLorean hitting potholes at 90 mph. Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, Sean Connery as Gandalf, Bill Murray as a clearly sardonic Batman. And yet, if there’s ever been an alternate timeline more deliciously unhinged than Nicolas Cage as the Green Goblin/Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, it’s probably already been confiscated by the police for crimes against narrative stability.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Cage’s possible involvement in the film: the Entertainment Weekly article from 24 years ago noted that Cage, John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe (who eventually landed the role) were “up for the Green Goblin.” But it seems to be the first time that Cage himself talks about it in detail. While promoting the new Spider-Noir series, Cage told Variety: “Sam and I had a big lunch, and I said over lunch, ‘Listen: Whoever plays Spider-Man, let him do a scene where he crawls like a spider when he’s alone,’ and it didn’t happen… He wanted me to do the Green Goblin. I liked Sam Raimi’s idea, because of Evil Dead 1 and 2, and I wanted to work with him.”
Cage added: “I had another movie called Adaptation. It happened with Jim [Carrey] and Dumb and Dumber, and I said, ‘I’m going to do this other movie called Leaving Las Vegas,’ and with Sam, I said, ‘I’m going to do Adaptation.’ Both decisions were the right ones for me and I am happy with the results.”
It’s hard to blame Cage for turning down the chance to take down Spidey in favor of Adaptation, Spike Jonze’s Susan Orlean-inspired hall of mirrors that earned him a best actor nomination at the 2003 Oscars. Plus, Dafoe provided arguably the best supervillain performance ever with his gorgeously fermented, mirror-annoying performance of the Goblin’s split identity. And yet, it’s hard not to imagine how Hollywood’s great maximalist could have dragged the entire enterprise into a stranger, sweatier, and even more operationally deranged dimension.
After all, Cage is an actor who has spent much of his career ignoring the idea of restraint. In Vampire’s Kiss, he ate a cockroach. In Face/Off, he played a man impersonating John Travolta and impersonating Nicolas Cage. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, we were given drugged-up police mania and iguana hallucinations. Imagine all that energy poured into Norman Osborn: the billionaire dad, weapons manufacturer, and unstable scientist who responds to a botched boardroom coup by developing a new personality and gleefully strafing his enemies from a flying killer scooter.
What’s really tantalizing is that Raimi could have been exactly the director who took advantage of it. Spider-Man is not a sober movie. It has rain-soaked upside-down kisses, skeletons vaporized by novel explosives, genetically modified spiders, and a final act that resembles an off-Broadway tragedy performed amid falling masonry. Cage could have arrived as the logical final boss of the film’s own heightened reality, smiling through the smoke as the entire image began to levitate two feet off the ground.
Could it have been too much? One of the reasons Raimi’s Spider-Man is so great is that Dafoe plays the perfect, maniacally out-of-character role of Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed naïve Peter Parker. He’s the twisted father figure Spidey never had, the warped vision of everything the wall-crawler wants to be, made monstrous by his own greed, vanity, and need for control. He comes in hard, but always has the acting discipline to stop the grandiloquence at the right moment. Even beneath that stiff green helmet, he somehow finds a performance of precisely wrought madness: not quite camp, not quite horror, but something teetering magnificently between the two.
Cage could have delivered something even more combustible and yet would have been just as likely to fall into a pumpkin bomb pantomime. We will never know which direction it might have gone. And the thing about Cage is that, for all his brilliance when landing a role, he may not have a clue either.
