Nick Cave: ‘People mix me up with Nicolas Cage all the time’

‘Sometimes it can be a bit of a pain in the neck, but you get used to it,’ the singer joked

Nick Cave has joked that he’s frequently mistaken for actor Nicolas Cage.

In the latest edition of the singer-songwriter’s newsletter The Red Hand Files – in which fans can send questions to the star – he responded to two enquiries: “Have you ever met Nicolas Cage?” and “Do you ever add an untrue component to a story to make it more interesting than it actually is?”

Cave’s letter addressed how often he’s misidentified as the actor, including an ironic detailed account of a time the two allegedly met at a pub in Lilydale, a suburb of Melbourne.

“People mix me up with Nicolas Cage all the time. Like, I’ll be going through customs and the customs officer will look at my passport and say, ‘Happy to have you with us, Mr Cave. Loved you in Face/Off,” he wrote.

Cave also recently used the Red Hand Files to defend himself from an accusation of “double standards” after expressing “undivided solidarity” with Ukraine.

One fan named Ahmet addressed Cave’s post about the Russia-Ukraine war, stating: “What bugs me about the Ukraine message, though, is that you haven’t expressed such a support for the Palestinian people.”

Ahmet continued by saying that Cave hasn’t “expressed clear and undivided solidarity with the Palestinian people who are also subjected to such a brutal treatment”.

In his response, Cave said: “There is little that I can disagree with in your letter, other than to say that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia is simply not the same thing as the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine; one is a brutal unprovoked attack on one state by another, in the hope of revising the entire security structure of Europe, and the other is a deeply complex clash of two nations that is far from straightforward.”