Nicolas Cage Plays John Madden, and Football Says He Sounds Like Nicolas Cage
A 38-second Madden teaser set off NFL Twitter, and now Von Miller has weighed in. The film opens in nine days, voice and all.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
On Oct. 27, Prime Video's movie account posted a 38-second teaser for Madden, David O. Russell's film about the late coach and broadcaster. In it, Nicolas Cage, as John Madden, sits in a booth next to Joel Murray's Pat Summerall and talks. That's all he does. And the football world has spent the week since reacting the way a dog reacts to a vacuum cleaner.
One Bills reporter, Ryan Talbot, put the consensus about as well as it can be put: 'Nicolas Cage's John Madden voice is literally just Nicolas Cage.' Others said worse. Over the weekend, Cowboys linebacker Von Miller took it up on his show, Free Range, and was more polite than the internet, which isn't hard. 'He's a great actor, but he didn't get Madden's voice right,' Miller said, adding that the movie's finished and there's no fixing it now. That is the cruelest thing you can tell an actor, and also the truest. The man's voice is in the can, like a ham.
In fairness to Cage, and I'll be fair to him once, every actor who plays a famous voice gets this. People have heard John Madden say 'boom' for 40 years, on Sundays and in a video game their kids played until the disc wore through. The man is a sound before he's a person. Nobody could get that right, the same way nobody can play your grandfather at his funeral. You'd notice the shoes.
But there's also the matter of Nicolas Cage, who has never once in his career sounded like anybody else. He's played a con man, an angel, a vampire, a man whose face was swapped with John Travolta's and Nicolas Cage. They all sounded like Nicolas Cage. You don't cast him to disappear into a part. You cast him the way you'd hire a bear for your birthday party, knowing full well the bear will do the bear thing.
The rest of the cast is something. Christian Bale plays Raiders owner Al Davis, Kathryn Hahn plays Madden's wife, Virginia, and John Mulaney plays Trip Hawkins, the EA founder who put Madden's name on the game. Shane Gillis is in it too. It opens in select theaters Nov. 11 and lands on Prime Video Nov. 18, at which point the country can decide for itself. My guess is that it'll be loud, strange and a little sad, which is also what most of us want from a Thanksgiving football broadcast. Folks forgive an impression. What they can't forgive is being reminded that the original is gone.