Here's Cage with a hawk (or maybe it's a falcon?) and some male models, just because. (Photo: Jonathan Leibson / Getty Images)

In recent years, Nicolas Cage has taken on roles with the same wild-eyed gusto with which he grabbed that choir singer’s butt in the opening sequence of Face/Off. And as one might expect, that sort of unfocused energy doesn’t always result in cinematic gold. His newest project sounds downright inspired, though: As Deadline reports, Cage has signed on to star in Mandy, the new film from director Panos Cosmatos, whose Beyond The Black Rainbow our own Alison Willmore called “a giddy drug-trip of a movie.” Cage will play Red Miller, “a broken and haunted man [who] hunts an unhinged religious sect who slaughtered the love of his life” in the “primal wilderness of 1983.”


Mandy is being produced by SpectreVision—the imprint co-owned by actor Elijah Wood that was behind A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and The Greasy Strangler—along with XYZ Films, which recently produced XX and I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. As SpectreVision’s Daniel Noah tells Deadline: “Nicolas Cage is a veritable god to those of us who grew up watching his classic performances. Bringing these two together for this surrealist, heavy-metal-soaked story of battle axes and demon bikers is unfathomably exciting to us.”

And to sweeten the proverbial pot, Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Oscar-nominated composer best known for his work with director Denis Villeneuve, has signed on to do the score. Mandy starts filming in Belgium this summer.