As Oscar-winning actor turned action-film hero, Nicholas Cage is riding high

IN CONAIR, A THRILLER ABOUT A MUTINY OF CONVICTED MURDERERS aboard a transport plane, Nicolas Cage plays Cameron Poe, a bad-luck good guy on his way home from serving eight years in San Quentin on a bum rap. Cage's body is buffed enough for a macho role, but the Academy Award-winning actor seems a stretch as an action star. With his stubbly beard and stringy hair, he looks like either Jesus with a grudge or the guy who stares at kids from the other side of a schoolyard fence. Then, an hour into the film, Poe finds a vil lain rifling his effects, including a furry toy bunny he bought for the daughter he's never seen. "Put the bunny back in the box," he whispers with slow righteousness-and he flashes the Stare That Kills. When the thug demurs, Poe brutally dispatches him, and on the way out says, "I told him to put the bunny back in the box." The audience applauds raucously, both at the scene's creepy-comic bravado and as an endorsement of Cage. Welcome, Nic, into the elite of movie-hero superstars.

The typical action star-your Arnold, your Sly-is a slab. Cinematic granite: a sullen face, eyes from beyond the grave and the subtlety of a steamroller. Then there's Cage. On screen he's quicksilver, always moving and creepily intense, more like th e wily loon that Stallone would blow away in Reel 5. Cage is a prime serious actor, and he has last year's Best Actor Oscar, for his role as the weary romantic suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, to prove it. "I never saw myself as a realist," he sa ys. "I always saw myself as a stylist trying to give a different slant on reality."

He is a student of the crypro-eccentric school of modern acting, or, as he says, "I sometimes use broad strokes." He is being modest; at times his brush could paint Hollywood Boulevard in one swath. Known for his fierce preparation for a role, he l ived in a car while playing the punk in Valley Girl, wore bandages off the set as a blind Vietnam vet in Birdy, videotaped himself drunk for Leaving Las Vegas. Some of his very early performances were mannerist bordering on the grotesque, and he was almo st fired from Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona and Moonstruck. "I was learning to act publicly," he admits, "and sometimes I'd fall on my face. I was an acquired taste, and it took people time to acquire me. Now I feel validated." So he should. Cag e has built as bold and affecting a body of work as any actor of his age.

Cage revels in revealing Middle-American desperation, the panic at knowing one has to get through the day. Even when he plays the sweetest people, he creates a roiling emotional subtext. There is odd stuff going on inside; he's wild and weird at he art. So he will furrow his brow and gaze doggily at the speaker, as if he's trying hard to listen to your problems so his head won't explode from all of his. Yet he can see the humor in himself. Says Shirley MacLaine, his co-star in Guarding Tess: "Nic winks at his own intensity."

It's clear why action-film producers would want Cage. For one thing, he's 33; this July, Schwarzenegger will turn 50, Stallone 51 and Harrison Ford 55. Says Stallone: "Nic brings a more character-driven sense to the action hero, a little darker, mo re complicated and conversational." Cage's broodiness can easily be translated into superhero resolve; or he can bring, as in The Rock, sweet vulnerability to a macho-movie starring role-"a man who is afraid," he says, "and is not afraid to cry." Finally , many women think the actor is dreamy. Cage laughs at this, saying, "I think I'm average-looking at best. But it's really about attitude. If you believe you're sexy, then you're sexy."

But why would Mr. Sexy Oscar Winner want to be an action figure? After last summer's hit The Rock, in which he played a biochemist reluctant to fight because he's a brainy geek, he stars in another Jerry Bruckheimer production, Con Air (to be relea sed in Australia next month), as a former Army Ranger who's reluctant to fight because his fists are lethal weapons. Later this year he plays an undercover agent who swaps identities with terrorist John Travolta in John Woo's sci-fi Face/Off. "We got per mission to be as outrageous as we wanted to be," says Travolta, "and we took it." Cage insists he isn't selling out; he's stepping up. "In some ways," he says, "I feel more creatively satisfied working in the action genre than I have on almost anything else. Action films are a tremendous world stage; everyone goes to them. And generally, they're not getting good character acting-just a little dialogue before cutting to the explosions."

Con Air, directed by Simon West, has a lot of dialogue and a lot of explosions. In fact, the movie has way too much of everything; it's as if Bruckheimer held a brainstorming conference, heard a dozen familiar story ideas and accepted them all. Con Air zooms along, full of throw-away thrills (the plane skidding toward a propane tank, a jettisoned human body landing on a car in downtown Fresno, Calif.) that other movies would save for the climax. In the middle of the tumult is Cage, finding some wi t and behavioral heft in his hint of a character.

He's going to keep backstroking in the mainstream a while longer. After finishing City of Angels, a remake of Wim Wenders' 1987 German masterpiece Wings of Desire, about an angel taking human form, he will appear in the Brian De Palma crime thrille r Snake Eyes. Then he will be airborne again, as Superman, under Tim Burton's direction. Here's Cage'stake on the Man of Steel: "I want to show how his heroic deeds come from a need to be accepted. He's an alien, he's been adopted, he senses he's differe nt-all the feelings of being weird and insecure." Superman and Clark Kent . . . well, Cage was destined to play some twisted comic-book hero. The son of August Coppola, a former professor of comparative literature, and Joy Vogelsang, a modern dancer who was often hospitalized for depression, Nicolas use d to ward off bullies by ripping his shirt apart and mock-raging like the Incredible Hulk. He got into movies in his teens and, upset by charges of nepotism (Uncle Francis cast him in three early films), took a new name from Luke Cage, a black comic-book superhero. His Teutonic mansion in the Hollywood Hills-featuring a ease of butterflies, a killer-bee mobile sculpture, dore screen panels flanking the monstro TV, a red piano-is also home to a huge comic-book collection.

It is one of several homes he shares with his wife, actress Patricia Arquette, 29. When they met nine years ago, she sent him on a daunting scavenger hunt-and yes, he brought back J.D. Salinger's autograph. They dated briefly, split, had kids with others, then wed two years ago.

"I am definitely still a Coppola," he says. "I learned so much from all my family. But I had to become Nicolas Cage to know I could do it on my own. I never legally changed it, but it's on my driver's license, it's on my passport. It's me."

On the Con Air flight, Cameron Poe sees a killer confined behind wire mesh. "I. was just admirin' your cage," he says. "Fits you pretty good." Nic Coppola's Cage fits him well too. He could rattle around in it for years, as Hollywood's premier man of Method action.