Nicolas Cage: King of the undead?

Let us take a break now from all the important news that passes before our radar, tales of military corruption and La Niña rains and endless in-depth coverage on How Steve Jobs Changed My Life, and take up a more pertinent matter to readers today:

Is Nicolas Cage a vampire?

That’s the rumor roaming the Net, thanks to a strange daguerreotype photo that’s been circulating, showing a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Con Air star, presumably taken in Civil War days.

That would be about 1865, for all you non-history buffs out there, and the photo is eerily realistic enough to convince many people that Cage either has a doppelganger from the past or a distant relative from Appomattox, or that he is one of the undead.

There’s a case to be made on either side.

Cage’s cribs: Nicolas Cage reportedly owned this castle in the Oberpfalz region of Germany, and the famously-haunted “La Laurie house” in New Orleans (right).

True, vampires don’t technically exist, except in popular culture. We live in a kind of Golden Age of bloodsuckers, what with TV series and movie franchises and best-selling books flooding the market. But so far, nobody has come out in public to suggest that any Hollywood actor is actually nosferatu — until now.

Cage would seem to fit the bill. Let us look at the circumstantial evidence.

• He once starred in Vampire’s Kiss, in which he played a yuppie literary agent in modern-day Manhattan who — after being bitten by a fanged Jennifer Beals — terrorizes his secretary, Maria Conchita Alonso, and generally acts like a full-blown lunatic in every frame of the movie. Apparently inspired by German Expressionist films at the time, Cage claims he modeled his eyebrow-arching, over-the-top performance on original Nosferatu star Max Schreck, among others. Oh, and Cage did eat live cockroaches in one scene. (For real.)

• Cage sports a series of strange accents in many of his films, running from the raspy-voiced characters in Peggy Sue Got Married and Raising Arizona to the rat-a-tat-tat singsong voice he uses in such films as Honeymoon in Vegas, Face/Off, The Family Man and many others. This disappearance into odd accents and voice characterization is not inconsistent with the shape-shifting habits of the undead, taking different forms over the course of history. Or, as Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips put it: “A performer whose truth lies deep in the artifice of performance: ladies and gentlemen, Nicolas Cage, at his finest.”

• Cage was briefly married to Lisa Marie Presley, thereby linking him to one of his heroes, Elvis Presley. While “The King” himself was never rumored to be a vampire, he is in a sense immortal, his Graceland mansion consistently being one of the highest-earning tourism sites in America.

• Cage has a history of buying up unusual property, a habit often associated with globetrotting vampires who need dark roosts to keep their many coffins. (Just read Bram Stalker’s novel or watch the 1931 Dracula with Bela Lugosi; you’ll get the idea.) The actor once purchased a medieval castle in the Oberpfalz region of Germany at a cost of $2.5 million.

And according to the actor himself, he once owned the “Most Haunted House in America,” located in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans itself is associated with vampires via Anne Rice’s series of novels (Interview with the Vampire, et al), and Cage’s purchase, known as “The LaLaurie house” after its former owner Delphine LaLaurie, was eventually sold at auction for $5.5 million.

Why all the houses? Well, Cage is still one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, despite a box office record that flutters as wildly as a Richter Scale needle on the San Andreas Fault Line. He pulls in some $40 million per film, whether it’s playing a crazy cop in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, or mumbling his way through another National Treasure sequel. That can buy a lot of basement space.

Undead and loving it: Cage goes for the jugular in the 1989 dark comedy Vampire’s Kiss.

• Cage’s acting style raises some eyebrows. Some, like Roger Ebert, claim he’s the epitome of artistic commitment, saying “No one else can project inner trembling so effectively.” Meanwhile, others see Cage diving off the deep end in performances and contend he’s gone to the other side, such as Sean Penn, who in 1999 told the New York Times that his one-time friend is “no longer an actor.” Does he mean that Cage is now, or has always been, a blood-sucking fiend? No comment from Penn at this time.

In his own defense, Cage claims to have created a new style of acting over his long career that he calls “Nouveau Shamanic” and plans to write a book about the method someday. Can’t wait for that one.

• Cage’s physical appearance. While not bearing the tell-tale death-like pallor of, say, Robert Pattinson’s ghoul in the Twilight movies, Cage is gaunt and often waxy in appearance. While he does seem to have aged naturally since early appearances as Rumble Fish and Valley Girl, his behavior remains essentially… unchanged.

• Finally, that eerie photograph. It shows a man who, superficially at least, resembles Nic Cage — from the thinning hair down to the sad arch of his eyebrows. But it’s not him. The ears are different, the facial shape is different. Or perhaps, one imagines, Cage posed for the photo and had it doctored to look over a hundred years old. It’s just the kind of gag that Cage — who freely uncorked his comical Italian accent in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and went completely eye-rolling bananas in The Wicker Man — would play on an unsuspecting public.

But it turns out the photo was in fact listed on eBay by a certain Jack Mörd of Seattle, Washington, who claims the daguerreotype “has not been manipulated in Photoshop or any other graphics program.” He’s asking $1 million for the original 1870 photograph of the man (identity unknown) who hails from Bristol, Tennessee.

Conclusion: Nic Cage is not a vampire.

He’s just a Hollywood actor.

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Next week: Is John Travolta a vampire?