6 Batty Purchases That Helped Bankrupt Nicolas Cage
Nic Cage is the shit. He’s like Guy Fieri or fanny packs; for too long, unfunny, uninteresting people used them as a punchline, wrote them off completely, and were blind to their undeniable, unmatched majesty. But, like with the fanny and Guy, eventually, even the blindest eventually see.
Sure, Cage has some movies and performances that are unforgivable, his own cinematic frosted tips sprinkled throughout his filmography, but if you take one million swings, you’re bound to strike out a time or two. Also, you might be forced to step up to the plate and swing at absolutely everything that comes your way after you basically just start slinging credit cards around like Gambit at anything and everything for a solid decade. It’s no secret that Nic Cage’s finances led to some interesting career choices, but it’s absolutely wild to take a deeper look at some of the purchases that landed him in that pickle, to begin with ...
7 Million Dollars Worth Of Bahamian Islands
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We start with the most reasonable. The one that you could see just about any megastar doing in the right frame of mind. And, of course, by the right frame of mind, I mean while their monkey butler zips a Lambo through a tunnel, and they do lines on the roof and try to find a way to match this high. For Cage, it was buying his own damn island in the Bahamas.
It's called Leaf Cay, which kinda sorta even sounds like "Nic Cage."
The most enjoyable part of all of this is picturing what Cage got into with all of that space and privacy. Rather than imagining that he leans even more into his manic persona, I’d like to think that in such an absurd, disconnect place, Cage is at his most grounded. His most normal. Looking out over his own private island in paradise, nobody around, Nic Cage finally has the time and desire to slip on a pair of boat shoes, pull out a Clive Cussler book, and kick his legs up to slide into the dull, vacation dad buzz that this man most definitely deserves.
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A $276k Dinosaur Skull … That Had Been Stolen
Oh yeah, now we’re getting into the good shit.
Idiot people like to say that “money can’t buy you happiness.” Those idiot people have also never been able to flip through Super Millionaire Quarterly and pick out their favorite goddamn Tyrannosaurus skull to buy. Take my leg, but also give me dinosaur skull money, and I’ll be the happiest man alive.
Cage bought the skull from what he believed to be a legitimate auction, undoubtedly stoked to bring that bastard home and just kind of toss it onto a bed in one of his three hundred guest rooms and completely forget about it, only to find out that he had to give it back.
Apparently, the skull was taken in Mongolia, and someone had to call up Cage to tell him the bad news. I bet he just had to pump out a ton of brutal calls to pissed off celebrities that day. This one sandwiched between dialing up Tom Cruise to tell him that he can’t actually, legally, own Jesus’ penis, then buzzing Liza Minnelli asking that she return the Sphinx’s nose, please. Either way, Cage returned his skull and was hit with a brief, nearly $300,000 memory of that one time he was this close to reanimating a Tyrannosaurus and letting it loose in Los Angeles.
A Shitload Of Stupid, Actually Living Exotic Animals
If you thought Nasty Nic would be satisfied with having dead animals in his pad, you clearly don’t know Cage. Where most celebrities and rich people are satiated with dog breeds that more resemble Jim Henson’s jizz rags than the wolves they descended from, Cage didn’t have time for that child’s play. Among the purported exotic pets that Cage owned were two albino king cobras. Because when you’re this utterly untethered from the human experience, someone may walk up to you and offer a pair of regular-ass king cobras for ownership, and you spit directly into their open mouth before telling them that if they don’t come back with albino ones before sundown, you’ll have them killed.
But that’s just the start of it; it gets even wilder when you factor in the $150,000 pet octopus that he credits with helping his career. And honestly, how could it not? If you’re sitting in your living room working on line reads and a massive octopus swims by in the wraparound living room aquarium, you’ll probably go back to the script wide-eyed and raving, stunned by the life you’ve created, ready to channel that energy into the scene.
He’s even rumored to have owned a shark and a crocodile, but they were all part of the things he had to forfeit over to the government in his massive unpaid taxes settlement. I would do just about anything to watch the security camera footage of Cage dropping a shark and a croc off at the doorstep to the IRS like the origin stories for a pair of Ninja Turtles bad guys, dusting off his hands, and walking away to let the cards fall where they may.
A Bunch Of Spooky-Ass New Orleans Shit
New Orleans is the perfect town for someone like Nicolas Cage. It’s one of the few places in the country where we actively invite insane behavior. Hell, it’s not just welcomed; it’s celebrated. So when you have a place like that that has an ancient house that’s supposed to be haunted as hell, you know Cage has got to get the keys.
The LaLaurie House is infamous for the actions of its horrific owner, Madame Delphine LaLaurie, and her awful treatment of the slaves she kept there. Famous for being super goddamn haunted, it must have caught Cage’s eye as he flipped through Shit, Man, You’re Rich as Hell, And We’ve Got Crazy Messed Up Stuff In Here To Sell If You Want To Take A Look Quarterly. He took a look and had to have the property, stating: “You know, other people have beachfront property; I have ghost front property - that's what I always say. I have not experienced anything, but I like a bit of mystery, and the house has such a mystery to it. Some of the stories about it are pretty horrific."
Naturally, the state took that shit from Cage when he lost all of his money, but there is one other weird New Orleans treasure of his they can’t get their hands on: his custom tomb.
Ryan Menezes
What? You thought Cage would be buried like you poor idiots? Get real. I’m just more curious about what’s on the inside of that bad boy and excited for a future where thousands of years from now, archaeologists are trying to break into this thing like the Pyramids to learn more about society, only to eventually get in and find a coked-out zombie in the corner and the jacket from Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. True, genuine artifacts that must be protected at all costs.
Some Shrunken Heads? Maybe?
There are some statements that are purely anecdotal that your brain can’t help but treat as outright fact. Something like Joel Osteen has bodies in his basement or, I think that Subway meat is actually round, shaved slices off of a homeless dude’s butt cheek. Here’s another for that list, Nic Cage owns a bunch of shrunken heads. Though this one has never been confirmed, it’s said that Cage has his own collection of shrunken heads, probably because people will not stop putting him on the mailing list for these weirdo celebrity mail-order catalogs, and the guy just can’t help himself.
I feel like if this is the stuff that has been reported, I’d imagine by the time that you actually make your way into Cage’s house for a tour, you’re so fried and overwhelmed that you glance over the shrunken heads like it was someone normal’s pots and pans collection.
A German Castle
There are probably a lot of little signs along the rocketship to superstardom that you miss when going truly insane. An accumulation of small details and moments. One that would probably tip off even the most disconnect among us is when you bust out the credit card for the purchase of a 500-year-old German castle. But that’s exactly what Cage did when he dropped $2.3 million on his very own Bavarian castle.
This is when interventions should really start happening. If I was in a crew with a bunch of stupid, rich people, pretty much everything listed above wouldn’t even get noticed. But the second we’re driving around Europe and one starts pulling up Redfin on goddamn medieval structures, I might schedule a little sit-down. It’s just bad business.
It’s also exactly the kind of lunacy that, sure, maybe bankrupted Cage for a minute and set him on the path to a decade or more of awful movies, but it’s also the kind of lunacy that makes him such an unbelievable actor and true individual. So, whatever, I say get a price check on the Moon, Nic, as long as that means we’ll get another few decades of your acting out of it.
Top Image: Gerald Geronimo, Klaus M/Wiki Commons
