I was told by an industry insider (taken at face value), that he almost never turned down a part, which drove his agent nuts. That's why he was in these kind of oddball movies. I suspect that Nicholas Cage is similar.
Consider that Mr. Zorg, Winston Churchill, and George Smiley, are played by the same person, is amazing.
But if you hear him in interviews he thinks of himself as a working actor. He’s doing the job. But the right people think he can do a good job so he’s getting better roles.
I'll never defend "Lost in Space" as a cinematic tour-de-force in the traditional sense but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most quintessentially-90s films ever made. It has Silicon Graphics logos and bubble-shaped silver electronics everywhere. William Hurt managed to find time to slip away from the "Dark City" set to make an appearance. Pre-Felicity Shagwell/post-Rollergirl Heather Graham fends off advances from Joey Tribbiani while the crazy guy from "Leon: The Professional" makes a bunch of bizarre wisecracking non-sequiturs. A brash Big beat remix of the original TV theme blares over the credits immediately following a fight involving a giant CGI (SGI?) spider.
I disliked it intensely as a kid but enjoy it a lot in retrospect because of my high-resolution nostalgia goggles.
Mine work in reverse, I guess.
I loved Space: 1999, when it was still being released.
I had occasion to revisit a syndicated episode, awhile back.
I stopped it after ten minutes.
Probably, although it’s also well documented that Cage took a lot of roles to pay off his extensive debts after blowing through nine digits of his wealth.
Given his behavior there for a while I was trying to do the math on how you blow through $65 million worth of... well, blow.
I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.