Nicolas Cage is not planning to retire from acting any time soon.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, the 57-year-old actor shared that he felt “healthy” when he was acting and he wouldn’t want to give it up.
“That can’t happen. To do what I do in cinema has been like a guardian angel for me, and I need it,” Nicolas told the outlet. “I’m healthier when I’m working, I need a positive place to express my life experience, and filmmaking has given me that. So I’m never going to retire. Where are we now, 117 movies?”
He continued, “What’s funny is, my argument with people who go, ‘You work too much,’ was ‘I like working, and it’s healthy, I’m happy when I’m working, and by the way, guys like Cagney and Bogart, they were doing hundreds of movies.’ And then I went, ‘I’d better check that,’ and I went, ‘Oops.’ Jerry Lewis was one of my friends, and he and I would go and have dinner together, and he would say, ‘How many movies you got?’ I go, ‘I got about 100, how many you got?’ ‘I got 40. So you got twice as much as me?’ ‘Well, I didn’t know that, Jerry.’”
That being said, Nichols had said that he was looking forward to taking a break from acting after making his next two films.
“At my age, the job that I have is to stay interested, because if I’m not interested, you’re not going to be interested. It gets more difficult the older we get,” he said. “So I have to find new ways of expressing myself, new challenges. But I do think, God willing, that once I finish the next two movies, I’m going to take some time off, because I think it’s time to recharge.”
It was recently announced that the Tiger King adaptation, in which he would have played Joe Exotic, had been scrapped on Amazon.