Nicolas Cage Wants You to Know He Doesn't Own a Castle

Like a lamb to the slaughter, the long-delayed Season of the Witch hits theaters on Friday as the first wide release of 2011. In the film, Nicolas Cage stars as a knight who must grapple with the after-effects of the Black Plague and a young girl (Verge designee Claire Foy) who may or may not be a witch. Did the famously unhinged Cage do anything out of the ordinary to prepare for his knightly role? "Well, actually I don't own a castle." Good to know, Nic!

Speaking at the New York premiere of Season of the Witch on Tuesday, Cage said that his fascination with knights, and not the aforementioned castle, was what drew him to the part. "[A]s a boy, I would pretend I was a knight in my backyard because my father built me a little wooden castle to play. And I think that's really where I cultivated my imagination, where I really came up with the idea that one day I had to play [a knight]."

Cage was also thrilled to learn how to ride a horse, something he hadn't had the opportunity to do before. "At first it was really scary but I had a great teacher named Camilla and an excellent horse named Dali, as in Salvador Dali. And she got me up to Cantry and over a hill in two days time, and then I was galloping and I started saying, this is the oldest relationship in the history of mankind, man and horse, and it's natural, and I relaxed and now really love it."

As he told Movieline, he also loves Dali. "[T]he horse was always really my friend. He liked me, and we had a really good relationship." Considering Cage's relationships with other citizens of nature (see: bees, roaches), that's certainly saying something.

Additional reporting done by Lindsey DiMattina