Nicolas Cage Won’t Play Another Serial Killer After ‘Longlegs’

There’s a reason why Nicolas Cage‘s serial killer character was hidden by the “Longlegs” trailers. Turns out, he is just that scary — and Cage insists it will be his sole serial killer role.

Cage stars as the titular occult serial killer in Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” which has critically been deemed one of the greatest serial killer films to date, even drawing comparisons to Academy Award-winning “Silence of the Lambs.”

Yet Cage won’t be playing that kind of killer ever again, as he told The New Yorker.

“I know that the phone’s going to be ringing off the hook to play serial killers after ‘Longlegs.’ And that’s not really what I like to do,” Cage said. “I don’t like violence. I don’t want to play people who are hurting people.”

In the film, Cage plays a Satanic serial killer who is being investigated by a FBI agent (Maika Monroe). The feature has personal ties to both Cage and writer/director Perkins, who told IndieWire the film is inspired by both of their respective parents.

Instead, Cage wants to lean into what he finds actually terrifying: TV. The actor will make his TV debut with upcoming Prime Video series “Noir,” and is also preparing for eight-episode limited series “The Carpenter’s Son.”

“Television is terrifying because you have only so much time to get the libretto in your body, and you have to keep going, keep going, keep shooting. And I thought, ‘That’s challenging.’ I’m afraid of it. I’ve never prepared like that before,” Cage said.

He added, “I’m a little behind the curve on this next one I’m doing, called ‘The Carpenter’s Son.’ But I get on the elliptical in the morning. I start reading the script from the front to the back. And then I reverse it and read it from the back to the front. And then I take the biggest — or, I should say, the most dialogue-intense — scenes and get them off the plate first, so they’re in my body. The problem that I have with it, though, is I’m carrying all that around in my head for two months, going through it every day, so that, by the time I get on the set, I’m not thinking about it, just flowing. But that’s a lot of memory retention every day for two months — and then for however long the movie takes. It’s yeoman’s work.”

Cage continued that the series will be “the equivalent of four movies in five months” in terms of production.

“And I’ve got another movie I’ve gotta prepare for, and then a movie right after it, and it’s another character that does not look like me,” Cage said, adding the character is a “nebbishy guy” and a “nerd” much like his role in “Dream Scenario.”