Taking it way back! Nicolas Cage showed off his impressive memory skills by revealing he can recall a moment from inside his mother’s womb.
“Let me think. Listen, I know this sounds really far out and I don’t know if it’s real or not but sometimes I think I can go all the way back to in utero and feeling like I could see faces in the dark or something,” Cage, 59, said during his Tuesday, May 2, appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “I know that sounds powerfully abstract, but that somehow seems like it maybe happened. Now that I am no longer in utero, I would have to imagine it was perhaps vocal vibrations resonating through to me at that stage.”
The Face/Off actor added that while he doesn’t “know” for sure if he remembers “being in utero,” it is something “that has crossed [his] mind” on occasion.
Cage’s comments came during the game “Questionert” with host Stephen Colbert, who asked the National Treasure star a series of questions – both light-hearted and deeply philosophical. In a more meaningful moment, the Oscar winner shared his belief on what happens after death.
“Nobody really knows, but they say electricity is forever, that it’s eternal and the spark keeps going,” he explained. “I think whatever spark is animating our bodies, once our body passes on the spark continues to go. But whether or not that electricity has consciousness or not, who could really say.”
A sillier question, meanwhile, required Cage to reveal his “least favorite smell,” in which he referred to wife Riko Shibata’s furry friend.
“My wife’s pet Pomeranian’s crap,” he quipped, to which the 58-year-old talk show host replied: “That’s very specific.”
Cage and Shibata, 29, tied the knot in February 2021 after meeting in Japan while the Renfield actor was filming Prisoners of the Ghostland. Us Weekly confirmed in January 2022 that the model was pregnant with Cage’s third child. The twosome welcome daughter August Francesca Coppola — nickname “Auggie” – in September 2022. (The California native is also dad of two sons. He shares Weston, 32, with ex-girlfriend Christina Fulton, and he welcomed Kal-El, now 17, with ex-wife Alice Kim, to whom he was married from 2004 to 2016).
In March, Cage gushed over the joys of fatherhood and gave an update on his little one.
“She’s singing really good songs. Her first song — I was very happy about it — naturally, it was about me,” he told Entertainment Tonight at the time. “She went, ‘Da da da, oun ja, oun ja.’ I thought it was a great song. I’m gonna steal it and I’m gonna get rich off my daughter’s song.”
Cage noted that seeing his daughter try things for the first time is one of his favorite parts of parenting. “Reliving the experience of childhood brings it all back, and seeing how she’s discovering new experiences. I can’t wait for her to try lobster and see what it looks like,” he joked.
The actor was also previously married to Patricia Arquette from 1995 to 2001. He moved on with the late Lisa Marie Presley from 2002 to 2004 and wed Erika Koike for four days in 2019. While the Between Worlds actor isn’t necessarily a fan of Shibata’s pup, he believes he’s finally found The One.
“I am a romantic, and when I’m in love, I want to give that person everything I can,” the California native explained to GQ in March 2022. “It’s my expression of saying, ‘I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ And this is it for me. … This is it. This is it.”
