Plenty of actors are known for bulking up to play action heroes, but Nicolas Cage isn’t really one of them. That turned out to be incredibly ironic, when the star’s intense training regimen for comic book adaptation Ghost Rider only ended up leading to accusations that his abs had been sculpted in post-production, as opposed to the gym.
Mark Steven Johnson’s supernatural superhero blockbuster is hardly lauded as a modern classic of the genre, but Johnny Blaze’s initial transformation into the Spirit of Vengeance does at least provide a memorable scene of unhinged Cage Rage, with the leading man going utterly and wonderfully berserk as he transforms into a flame-skulled antihero.
He’s most definitely ripped, as those abs would attest, but plenty of folks weren’t buying it. In fact, Cage admitted in an recent interview with GQ that he completely lost interest in getting jacked in the name of his craft when he discovered that people were doubting his natural ability to get shredded.
“They are real, and that’s why I’ll never work out that hard again. Because nobody wanted to believe they were real and they wanted to believe it was CGI, which it wasn’t so what’s the point?”
It’s a fair point, and it must have stung a little for Cage to put so much effort into cultivating a physique suitable for a superhero, only for people to skeptically (and inaccurately, as it turned out) claim that he was lent an assist by the Ghost Rider computer wizards.