There’s a secret reason Nicolas Cage’s face looks so weird in Longlegs

Oz Perkins’ oddball movie Longlegs does a lot of genre-hopping: It’s part police procedural, part serial-killer thriller, part supernatural horror movie, with a lot of little detours down lanes that shuffle it further into various subgenres. And it raises a lot of questions it never answers. In particular, the killer — an isolated oddball who styles himself as “Longlegs” in cryptic messages he leaves for law enforcement — has such an odd appearance that it raises the question of whether there’s a supernatural element to that, as well.

Longlegs’ look isn’t addressed during the movie, apart from a scene where a hardware-store employee (played by Perkins’ daughter Bea) calls Longlegs a weirdo. People don’t even seem to acknowledge that he looks like someone slapped wet, greasy, white modeling clay all over his face, then walked away. While the prosthetics job could be seen as just a way to hide Nicolas Cage’s face out of a fear that the iconic actor is too familiar and his presence might be distracting, the press notes for the movie have a different explanation that the movie doesn’t even hint at.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Longlegs.]

As viewers eventually learn, Longlegs, as he styles himself, is a Satanist who’s been busily gathering souls for the devil by making evil dolls and sending them to families under the guise that they’ve won some sort of contest. Once the doll enters each household, the father of the family succumbs to a form of possession and murders everyone in the house, then kills himself. When Longlegs is caught, he makes it clear to protagonist Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) that he expects Satan to lavishly reward him for these deeds — he isn’t afraid of his impending death, because (something like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope), he expects to be “everywhere” after he dies.

This fervent dedication to Satan, as it turns out, actually explains his pale, lumpy, plasticky appearance. According to the movie’s press notes, Longlegs’ face is a result of repeated plastic surgeries gone wrong:

When Perkins initially approached special makeup effects artist Harlow MacFarlane about creating the face of Longlegs, MacFarlane says, “From the beginning, Oz always had this glam rock vibe in his head.” The big hair, the garish makeup, the superficial aesthetic fixation that might lead a person to go under the knife so they could remain forever young. But more than being driven by style, Longlegs would be a man driven by obsessive devotion.

“His jam is really that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the Devil,” explains MacFarlane. “He’s in love with the Devil, and he’s trying to impress the Devil, so he’s gone through all these plastic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as pretty as he can for the Devil. Every thing he does is for this evil force that he’s trying to impress.” […]

Getting the faded glam sadist look just right meant researching the state of elective surgery in the late 70s and early 80s — with characters living in semi-rural Oregon, no less — and then building from a foundation of bad work marked by overfilling and visible scarring. There would be layers of pain atop layers of pain. “You can just imagine it’s some hack job of a doctor in a strip mall somewhere,” says MacFarlane, who worked closely with Perkins and Cage to hone the final product.

According to the same notes, MacFarlane looked at Gary Oldman’s makeup as Mason Verger in the movie Hannibal as one potential source of inspiration. In the 2001 sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Mason was a rapist and pedophile who Hannibal Lecter drugged and convinced to slice off his own face, resulting in tremendous mutilation that could only be partially repaired with surgery.

Cage also suggested an approach similar to Lon Chaney’s makeup in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera. Both inspirations were ultimately considered over-the-top for Perkins’ movie, but both are somewhat reflected in the final results. A note at the end of that section also reveals something Cage was hoping to see on screen that never happened: He wanted Longlegs to “fully pull his nose off at one point during the movie.”

Image: Universal/Everett Collection

There is no word in the movie or the press notes about how Satan feels about Longlegs’ current face.

Another interesting piece of trivia does come up in the notes: Perkins concealed the character’s final appearance from Monroe until he shot the scene where they first come face-to-face in an FBI interrogation room, because he wanted her unnerved response to be authentic in the moment.

“On horror sets, so many people ask if it’s scary or is it spooky. And it really isn’t! You see all the gags. You see the fake blood,” Monroe says in the press notes. “But for the first time, I was really able to experience this genuine feeling of being very uncomfortable and nervous and scared and fearful of opening that door, of what I was going to see. […] Oz didn’t let me see any photos or anything. I knew [Cage] was sitting in the hair and makeup chair for several hours, but I had no idea! It was a pretty surreal experience that I will definitely never forget.”