I miss the days when actors had bad hair days. When their coifs weren’t so coiffed, when their heads were allowed to look scruffy, greasy, crazy, unkempt. Not Robert Pattinson mousse-mussed, but genuinely dishabille. I miss the days when they could even be — maybe we should whisper this — bald. I admit that I have something of a personal stake in this. I’m a follically challenged male, and perhaps I speak for others who are losing their hair when I say that it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if we were represented a little more often on screen, and not just by the usual character actors playing dweebish bank tellers and Internet wizards. I do like to think, however, that even if God had graced me with the Jim Morrison-on-Kiehl’s mane of Adrian Grenier, that I’d still want to stand up for a little more healthy hair diversity among contemporary Hollywood leading men. These days, if an actor is losing his hair, he isn’t allowed to show it. He’s got to be plugged, weaved, bobbed, re-strung. In effect, he’s not himself — he’s wearing a permanent costume.
In the new Werner Herzog remake of Bad Lieutenant (it comes out next week — here’s what I wrote about it from the Toronto film festival), Nicolas Cage plays a New Orleans homicide detective who is always high on coke, heroin, OxyContin, or some combination thereof, and Cage, playing this furtive and tormented enforcer/addict, gives the return-to-form performance that a lot of us have been waiting for him to give. The luscious joke of the movie is that Cage, as Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, is wild and operatic and monomaniacally over-the-top, just as he has been so often in his trashy paycheck genre movies. Only now, his beady-eyed gonzo theatrics are part of a deftly controlled character study. McConagh, trapped in the evil pleasure of his addictions, also uses those addictions to be a more sneakily effective cop. He’s like a crackhead undercover agent in hell.
Cage is mesmerizing in Bad Lieutenant, but there’s one aspect of him that hasn’t changed: He still sprouts what I think of as his popcorn-blockbuster hair — that perfectly sculpted widow’s peak of shiny black strands that just about erupts from the front of his head, only to be swept back into a kind of Peter O’Toole-meets-Igor curtain of hair. He wears a better, more organic version of the ‘do in Bad Lieutenant (maybe that’s Herzog’s attention to detail), but there are still moments when it looks like this…thing.
To jog my memory, I went back again to watch Cage’s great, Academy Award-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas (that’s an image of him from it, above on the left) — which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the last serious movie he appeared in before he began to sport that cream-rinse Frédéric Chopin coif. As Ben Sanderson, the failed-screenwriter-turned-suicidal-alcoholic hero of Leaving Las Vegas, Cage doesn’t look that much different than he does today, but his face is a mite fleshier (which, frankly, makes him seem a little more human), and his hair, receding a bit more than we remember, is scraggly and wispy-brown, with a bit of flyaway fuzz. It’s absent-minded-professor hair — the hair of someone with too much on his mind — and it perfectly serves the character, who is full of longing and regret, at times disarmingly tender, yet fundamentally lost. Even within Cage’s aching, often very quiet performance, there are over-the-top moments of rage and cracked drunken delirium, but they feel like Ben’s, not the actor’s. In Leaving Las Vegas, Cage looks every inch the character he’s playing, because from the hairline down he has left vanity behind.
To me, it’s no coincidence that Cage, after the triumph of Leaving Las Vegas, began to star in dumb-whore action films at the same moment that he first sported his sleekly flowing, industrial-strength “cool” hair. He was, in effect, becoming a Hollywood puppet, complete with all the trimmings, including on top of his head. Yet I hardly think I’m alone in feeling that this shiny super-coif has, over the years, subtly detracted from his work as an actor. When the movies turned seriously bad (Bangkok Dangerous, Knowing), it just about defined him; the hair was almost all there was to look at. We can all debate what his last truly inspired performance was (Matchstick Men? World Trade Center?), but to me it’s in Adaptation. A movie in which he went back to having nerd-fuzz anti-hair.
In Bad Lieutenant, Cage, once again, is back to being an authentic actor. Even the hair looks fairly good on him. It suits the thrill-seeking nightclub-underbelly depravity of the character — for once he’s wearing the hair, instead of it wearing him. What I want to know is: How much time do you spend during a typical Nicolas Cage performance thinking about his hair? And when it comes to that subject, would he — and other actors — do well to let nature take its course? In other words, should there be more actors out there who look like more of us?
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I hear ya. And are we going to do similar articles on John Travolta or “Law & Order: SVU”’s Chris Meloni? Some people are re-sodding the grass.
When were leading actors ever allowed to regularly be bald or mussed up? Character actors, yes, but how many people were playing to see Patrick Stewart as a romantic lead? Even Sean Connery wore a rug.
Bruce Willis was balding in the first Die Hard, he had natural hair.
He also had his head shots in every frame in Hudson Hawk movie (who remembers that!) retouched to hide his thinning hair.
Robert Pattinson doesn’t use mousse, it’s good old fashioned grease.
Not true. Though I’m not a fan of his hair, it’s easy enough to tell that a lot of product goes on it.
You forgot the biggest mess ever of his hair career — GHOST RIDER. Was he suppose to play younger? Older? UGH! So nasty!
I totally agree! His hair was sooo awful in that movie. Although, his awful hair gave me something to focus on during that horrible movie; Cage’s horrible hairpiece was the only thing I remembered from the film.
Sure, and how about more actresses who represent the norm? I’m guessing that men don’t want to look at “average” women on the big screen any more than women want to see “average” men. Unfortunately, we like them perfect in American cinema.
At last, equal treatment in Hollywood: impossible standards of beauty for women, impossible standards of beauty for men.
I NEVER look at Nicholas Cage without thinking about his hair. I don’t think it’s possible not to. Natural is always better when it comes to an actor’s appearance. That goes for hair,or lack thereof, AND plastic surgery.
I spend so much time thinking about Nicolas Cages’s hair, I can no longer watch his movies. UGH! I can’t look at him. And I like him, I just hate his hair.
Why the obsession over his hair? Like a lot of men, he suffered from thinning hair since his 20s. Since looks are important to mainstream actors, perhaps he had something done, especially in the front and top. Check out his early guest host appearances on SNL. Anyway, I like a lot of the fringe characters he plays. I feel these crazy characters are closer to his real personality, based on several interviews I have watched.
I’ve been wondering for a good long time why exactly anyone lets him get away with that hair in their films. It looks terrible, and often, it doesn’t make sense for the characters he’s playing to have gotten hair implants, which he so unsubtly has. Bleck.
I feel the same way about John Travolta and Jeremy Piven. Anyone remember in the 90s when Piven was on Ellen and nearly as bald as George Costanza?
I spend zero time thinking about Nicholas Cage’s hair, and I suggest you do the same, Owen. What a dumb article! I thought this would be a good Nic Cage piece, but it turned out to be uninteresting and uninspired. Blah.
Uninteresting and uninspired, just like his last 10 movies. i enjoyed his work when he was a compelling presence, but now he is just the worst. Also you used the phrase “good Nic Cage piece” in reference to an article about his abysmal toupees’. Nice.
It deserves it’s own spot when the credits role.
Vin Diesel makes bald beautiful! Who said bald isn’t beautiful!
I’m all for movie hair. We have to suspend disbelief anyway to enjoy movies anyway.
If I wanted to see normal hair I’d spend two hours at the DMV. Now there’s a real character study, and much more entertaining than most movies these days.