Nicolas Cage may love animals more than he loves money. The eccentric actor is said to have burned through some $150 million — blown on eccentric splurges such as a 67-million-year-old dinosaur head, a couple of islands and the first “Superman” comic — but his exotic pets are a constant. He’s cared for snakes, crows, cats, turtles, fish and at least one octopus.
As revealed in the April issue of GQ, maintaining his menagerie comes with challenges and pleasures. While fussing over his Maine coon cat, Merlin, he told the magazine, “He’s so kind and so loving. Sometimes he puts his arm around me when he’s sleeping and I think it’s my wife … ”
Cage once owned a two-headed snake, purchased for $80,000 after he dreamed about a two-headed eagle. But it was double trouble feeding the reptile so he donated it to the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans.
“Both heads were fully functional and capable of swallowing,” Robert Mendyk, curator of herpetology at the zoo, told The Post. “We had to take turns feeding each head and place a rubber spatula between the heads to prevent one head from fighting over the other head’s food.”
Here is an accounting of Cage’s mostly uncaged flock, past and present.
Huginn the talking crow
Cage’s crow lives inside a geodesic dome in the actor’s Las Vegas house. No ordinary bird, this high-flyer possesses a shock of white feathers up front and actually talks. Though Cage was initially drawn to the Edgar Allan Poe connotations of the crow, he now seems to get a kick out of the fact that Hoogin calls him names. As he told the LA Times, “When I leave the room, he’ll go ‘bye’ and then go, ‘Ass.’”
An octopus
Back in the mid 1980s, while living in a Hollywood apartment, Cage had a pet octopus that he kept in an aquarium. According to Los Angeles Times, the creature was hiding behind a rock and Cage wanted to pry it loose for the benefit of a visitor. It squirted ink on his hand and he responded, “What a pity. Just when we were beginning to get along.”
King cobras Moby and Sheba
During an appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman,” Cage told the show host about his pair of king cobras: a female named Sheba and an albino male who went by Moby.
“I have them behind two computer locked doors [with] bullet-proof glass,” he said. “I like to go in there in my red leather chair and drink wine and watch them as they watch me.”
Cage took pains to point out that if he got bitten, he would have just 15 minutes to live and that he kept antidote nearby, just in case. He added that one of the snakes pets — since donated to a zoo — routinely tried to hypnotize him before lunging. “After that,” he told Letterman, “I say, ‘Goodnight kids,’ go upstairs and lie down and think about what just happened.’”
Harvey the two-headed snake
Cage named his two-headed snake Harvey, in homage to the two-faced “Batman” villain Harvey Dent. The reptile, which passed away last September at the age of 14 (pretty good, considering that, according to Mendyk, “most embryos with the condition do not successfully hatch”), caught the fancy of director Werner Herzog who directed Cage in “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”
Cage was hosting a party in the Big Easy and brought out the snake, to the horror of his guests. Herzog, though, said, “Now, Nicolas, we have to put that into the movie.” As Cage explained it to Interview magazine, “I said, ‘No, I’m not putting it into the movie because this is personal.’ So he filled the movie with snakes, iguanas and alligators, but he never got my two-headed snake.”
Speckled Asian water monitor lizard
Once the reptile grew to be a five-foot-long animal of prey, the actor did not have time to care for it properly. No problem: Wild Life Discovery Center, in Lake Forest, Illinois, happily took it off his hands.
Cage apparently shipped it there in an overnight FedEx box. But, as Center curator Rob Carmichael told Gazebo News, the giant lizard named Michael arrived no worse for wear: “He has a few dings and needs to be fattened up a bit. But, overall, he’s in pretty good shape. The following day [after arriving], he dined on quail, mice and rats — yummy to a big, predatory lizard.”