Nicolas Cage to call it quits with acting in 'three or four' years

Drink in as much Nicolas Cage as you can, because the screen icon is planning to quit in the next few years.

After that, he’ll be fixing his sights far more on the art of directing.

The star of movies like Raising Arizona and Leaving Las Vegas was being interviewed in Puerto Rico to promote new movie Primal when he dropped the bombshell.

“In terms of producing and directing, yes, I’m getting back in production. My company, Saturn Films, is involved in all the movies I’m doing now,” he told the assembled media (via The Blast).

“And directing is something I look forward to down the road because right now, I’m primarily a film performer and I’m gonna continue doing that for three or four more years and [then] I’d like to focus more on directing.”

He added that his reasons for keeping busy are to keep himself out of trouble.

“I have multiple reasons for wanting to work. One of them is, to be blatantly honest, I can be a little self-destructive if I’m not focused on my job,” he went on.

“It’s the difference between maybe having one bottle of wine versus two bottles of wine.”

That’s one reason, perhaps, but another is the towering debts he amassed to the IRS over his career, thanks to a reported habit of wild spending combined with bad financial advice.

Cage has starred in a stunning amount of movies in recent years, more than 30 over the past decade, many of which have been of the ‘straight-to-DVD’ calibre, the salaries from which have gone towards paying back the tax man for a bill supposedly topping $6 million.

He amassed a huge portfolio of property, including castles in Bavaria and Somerset, and a supposedly haunted mansion in New Orleans, as well as a fleet of Rolls Royces, a lavish collection of objet d’art and a dinosaur skull which he beat Leonardo DiCaprio to at auction.

It’s claimed he could have blown as much as $150 million, some of which went on securing his own island in the Bahamas.

But nevertheless, for fans of Con Air, Face/Off, The Rock, Adaptation, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and even his demented turn in the remake of The Wicker Man (‘Not the bees!’), this news will remain something of a blow.

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