Face/Off is a lot of things: an extremely mid-1990s action-thriller; John Woo’s second highest-grossing movie after Mission: Impossible 2; a showcase for John Travolta and Nicolas Cage to not chew but devour the scenery. But one thing it’s not is “sexy.”
Tiffany Haddish may disagree.
The Tuca and Bertie star will soon appear in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, where Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself. “I don’t know Nicolas Cage, and he seems to be like the kind of guy that’s like, all right, so now we’re going to do this scene, and this is how it goes,” she said on NPR’s It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders about meeting the Oscar winner. “And, all right, here we go. Nice to meet you. I’m like, I’ve been watching you my whole life, and I have to tell you this, like, thing.” That thing?
“So basically, I was at the movie theater seeing Face/Off. I was about 17 years old, on a date with this guy. And nobody else was in the theater, really. It was just us in the back of the theater. And we started to make out. We started making out and stuff. And then it was my first time being fiddled with. I will say it like that, OK? As I was achieving a momentous moment that I had never experienced in my life, I opened my eyes, and the eyes of Nicolas Cage are looking into my eyes super big, right?… That was my first big O.”
Haddish was initially hesitant to tell Cage this story (“I don’t want him to hit me with the sexual harassment”), and when she did, “all I [could] think about is the guy that I went to the movies with and how we were like, you know, and we were making out and then that feeling and then how weird I feel in remembering this in front of him. And then there [Cage] is looking at me.” Lucky for Haddish, Cage “laughed super hard” at her confession. He was probably relieved that her “first big O” wasn’t during Leaving Las Vegas. Now that would be weird.
You can watch the NPR interview below (the Cage story is at the 10:30 mark).