Nicolas Cage admits to debilitating fear of surfers as a child

"It was quite intimidating... they were pretty jacked up, both mentally and physically.”

Nicolas Kim Coppola, born in Long Beach, California circa 1962 to a professor father and dancer/choreographer mother, was destined to be something different. His paternal uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, had stamped his name on filmmaking by the time young Nicolas was 10, with the masterpiece The Godfather and the li’l dreamer wanted to follow him into a life of moving pictures. He did not, however, want to appear nepotistic so changed his surname to “Cage” and the rest became history. Many iconic staring roles, acclaim, riches.

Nic Cage is a living treasure, his latest picture The Surfer being hailed as “a sun-soaked plagiarism of Wake in Fright,” but did you know the Academy Award winner was once terrified of surfers themselves?

Sitting down with Extra, Cage revealed of his time in Santa Monica, “I was quite young, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get past the group that was surfing, or, you know, the line, if you will. It was quite intimidating. I had a lot of admiration for surfers and for what they do, but I also feared them as a young man because they were pretty jacked up, both mentally and physically.”

But do you know who one of the jacked up, both mentally and physically, scary surfers would have most certainly been in that day?

None other than Matt Warshaw.

Surfing’s wizened wizard came of age during those wild 1970s Santa Monica days and, no doubt, would have been hanging off the pier, menacing Cage as he tried to walk by.

Sneering, snarling, intimidating.

Yikes.

There is little doubt Cage channeled his childhood trauma, Warshaw’s louring visage, to play The Surfer. Have you seen yet?

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