Maxance Vincent
Before joining Spider-Noir and portraying Robbie Robertson, actor Lamorne Morris had some preconceptions of who Nicolas Cage was as an actor, as he explains to Awards Radar on Zoom, but didn’t expect the Academy Award-winning performer to be so welcoming as the two worked together to build the friendship between detective Ben Reilly and Robbie:
“I’ve heard stories, the same stories everybody else had heard of how eccentric he might be or bold. I didn’t know if that was a good thing for me or a bad thing. I didn’t know what to expect. When you meet superstars, they all have their own personalities, but will they be a welcoming personality or will they be a very closed-off personality? He was the welcoming type. He’s very open, very communicative, he’s the most giving, kindest actor I’ve ever worked with. He himself has a superpower: the ability to disarm people. People are tense around him, and he knows it, so he likes to break the ice. It’s such a fun thing to be around him, because he gives you what you’re asking for. He’s the actor who’s known for a thing, and he’s gonna do it a little bit just to break the tension in this room, and everybody’s just like “Damn, that’s so cool.”
Working with him, Morris explains that he learned one thing that has been extremely eye-opening on how to build a craft of acting:
“As a performer, you’ve got to do research. I remember wanting to be a journalist when I was younger. I wanted to be a sports journalist. I got an internship at Fox Sports with this reporter named Corey McPherrin, who’s a Chicago legend. When I started the internship, what blew my mind was how much research I needed to do. It was on another level. When I started acting, of course, there was some research in acting, but until I met Nic Cage. I hadn’t realized how much research this man knows, everything he researches.
There was a time when the director gave him a note, and he immediately recalled an old film. I can’t remember the film, but the director said, “So, Nic, the camera’s going to move from here, it’s going to push in, it’s going to land right there.” Then, Nic was like, “Yeah, like Rooney, ‘42.” Immediately, I was like, “What are you talking about?” He immediately pulled from an old film, and, to me, that is the sign of a prepared actor. Some actors are loose, free, charismatic, big, charming, and bold, and it works for them. But Nic made me realize that you really have to ingest it all. If you’re using weapons, your guns have to be loaded. You never know what a director is going to ask you. You’ve got to have that bullet in your chamber and in your bag. He has everything in his bag. It’s 45 years of film experience. He is a master at what he does, and for me, it was the research element, which I thought I avoided by not being a journalist. I realized that there’s a lot of research and a lot of digging that goes into acting, and that was something I definitely learned that was very eye-opening.”
Watch our full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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