If I were to ask someone to name two of the biggest movie stars of all time, Johnny Depp and Nicolas Cage’s names would probably come up. So, it doesn’t surprise me that their paths might have crossed over the years. However, I just learned that Cage was directly involved in Depp’s rise to fame, and I’m absolutely shook.
Somehow, Cage and Depp never starred in the same movie together, but they were briefly roommates back in the 1980s when the Pirates of the Caribbean star was fresh to Hollywood. Here’s how Cage tells it:
We were dating the same girl, and he came to L.A. not wanting to like me. He was a guitar player. I liked him right away, and he said, ‘I like Nick… I can’t not like him.’ We became very good friends, and we were playing Monopoly one day. He was having a very hard time financially — he was selling pens, I believe, and I let him live in my apartment, but then he started stealing my money to buy drinks — and I said, ‘Why don’t you just try acting?’ And he said, ‘I can’t act.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you can. Why don’t you just go meet with my agent?’ And he met with my agent, and the rest is history. He was an ‘overnight sensation,’ as they say.
He’s talking about 1983, when Johnny Depp was 20 years old and decided to move to Los Angeles from Florida to pursue a record deal with his band. Cage must have been around 19 then, but since he was born in the Coppola family, he already had some connections in the movie industry and had just been in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Cage told this story about him and Depp to Variety while promoting his project on the 2026 TV schedule, Spider-Noir, which is now streaming for those with a Prime Video subscription. In a previous interview with The New York Times Magazine, he said his agent ended up sending Johnny Depp to his first audition, which was for Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Depp got the part that day, and thus his long-running career was born. Cage and Depp have also reportedly remained friends over the years.
When Johnny Depp first started acting, he apparently thought of it as “a good way to pay rent for a minute,” per Paper Magazine, but considering the breakneck speed at which he saw success as an actor, it’s no wonder he stuck with it. Previously, Cage said he “can’t really take credit” for jumpstarting Depp’s career since it was “just one small step in his whole career”, but you can certainly argue he was instrumental in the Edward Scissorhands actor getting into the industry.
These days, Johnny Depp has been slowly bouncing back to acting after a very public legal battle with his ex Amber Heard. He’ll star as Ebenezer Scrooge in Ti West’s A Christmas Carol movie, which is on the 2026 movie schedule for this holiday season.
Anyways, I didn’t see this story coming, but leave it up to Nicolas Cage to casually drop some remarkable lore like this.