Nick Cave and Nicolas Cage are two of the most unmistakeable personalities in their fields. One is an artistic mastermind with striking vampiric looks who has used his intimate appreciation of avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen to elevate a popular art form to the realm of greatness—and the other fronts a band called the Bad Seeds. Apparently, though, beyond the echo chambers of music blogs and Wicker Man memes, a wider world exists where people struggle to tell them apart. Cave has written in the past about such cases of mistaken identity, and, last week, Cage told The Guardian, “I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I’m not mistaken for Nick Cave.” In response, Cave shared a new anecdote in his latest dispatch of The Red Hand Files concerning the “persistent and somewhat perplexing confusion surrounding our names.”
Cave relays a story from a São Paulo bar, where he got chatting to a young, wallowing Brazilian man who introduced himself as Diego. When he asked for Cave’s name, the bartender leaned over and told him, “Dude, you’re talking to fucking Nick Cave!” Diego “became super-animated,” says Cave, “jumping around on his stool, saying that he loved me, that he was my greatest fan, and so on and so forth.” After some hours of more cheerful chatter, Cave recalls, Diego burst into tears and admitted his wife had kicked me out. She hated him, he said—“but she fucking loves you.” Cave replied, “Really?” and got the inevitable news. “Yeah, Peggy Sue Got Married is her favourite film,” Diego said. “She’s watched it like a hundred times.”
Such was the young man’s “pitiful mixture of tragedy and wonder” that Cave did not have the heart to tell him he had made a mistake. Continues Cave in the newsletter, “He asked me about my acting career. I said something like, ‘I’m just an ordinary person like you. Hollywood is not all it’s cracked up to be. It can be a cruel place. It gets lonely sometimes,’ and so on. After a while, I began to warm to my theme. I told him that making Raising Arizona was the most extraordinary experience and a highpoint in my career, that John Goodman was a fascinating and complex character, and how it was a real privilege to work with the Coen brothers and that they were ‘masters of their craft’ and all this bullshit. Eventually, Diego decided he should go back home and tell his wife, Ana, that he’d met her favourite actor, and that Nick Cave says he’s not stupid, and that he’s a good guy.”
Cave wriggled out of that by saying he had to be on set early. Instead, he wrote Diego a note: “Dear Ana, Diego is not stupid. He’s a good guy. Love, Nic Cage.”
Cave concludes, “Diego hugged and kissed me and stumbled out of the door, waving the note in his hand.… Anyway, these confusions between me and Mr. Cage happen fairly often. But I don’t mind. I’m a fan. Have you guys seen Mandy? My God. What a film.” Read the full account in the Red Hand Files archive.
