Nicolas Cage acted as 'Cage' for over 40 years, but didn't legally change his name from Coppola until 2025 — at age 61.

The actor known professionally as Nicolas Cage since the early 1980s didn't make "Cage" his legal name until 2025, when he was 61.

For more than four decades, "Nicolas Cage" was a professional fiction resting on a legal fact: the name on the paperwork was still Nicolas Kim Coppola. The Oscar winner adopted "Cage" at the start of his career in the early 1980s, but he only made it official in 2025. He was 61 years old.

Cage disclosed the change himself in an interview with Variety, published May 27, 2026. "I changed my name legally last year," he said — meaning 2025, decades after audiences first met the persona. NBC New York and TODAY, both NBCUniversal outlets, quoted that line directly, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported the same in a piece headlined "Nicolas Cage says he legally dropped Coppola surname," noting he had "legally dropped his family name Coppola last year."

Why Nicolas Cage dropped the Coppola name in the first place

The original swap was about family. Cage was born into Hollywood royalty: his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola, director of "The Godfather," and the wider Coppola clan includes cousins and relatives scattered across film. A young actor carrying that surname into auditions would inevitably invite the suspicion that doors were opening because of who his uncle was.

So he took a new name to avoid the appearance of nepotism — a decision that let his early work stand or fall on its own. The stage name is often traced to the comic-book character Luke Cage and to avant-garde composer John Cage, though the choice was, at bottom, a way to step out from under the Coppola shadow at the exact moment the family name would have followed him into every casting room.

What's striking is how long the arrangement lasted. Cage built an entire career — an Academy Award for "Leaving Las Vegas" in 1996, blockbusters, a late-career reinvention as a cult favorite — all while "Cage" remained, technically, a professional alias. The name the world knew was not the name the government did.

How we know the 2025 change is real

The cleanest source here is Cage himself, on the record with Variety in May 2026. That's a direct first-person statement to a major trade publication, not a secondhand rumor or a fan-site claim. The Chronicle and NBC's outlets independently reported and quoted the same interview, and Cage's Wikipedia entry now states he changed his name to avoid the appearance of nepotism and "only legally changed it in 2025."

It's worth being precise about the timeline, because it's easy to garble. The interview ran on May 27, 2026. In it, Cage said he changed his name "last year." That places the legal change in 2025, when he was 61 — not in the early 1980s, when he first started using "Cage" onscreen. The gap between adopting the name and owning it legally is the whole point: roughly forty years passed between the two.

There's a small, human detail buried in the arithmetic. The Chronicle described Cage as the 62-year-old nephew of Francis Ford Coppola. For most of a lifetime — through fame, awards, marriages, financial ups and downs, and a filmography that runs into the hundreds — the paperwork in a drawer still read Coppola. He had been "Cage" to the entire world for longer than most people are alive before he ever became "Cage" to a courthouse.

Which leaves the question Cage himself hasn't fully answered: why now? A name adopted to sidestep nepotism at 20 had long since outlived that worry — by 2025 nobody doubted the work was his own. Making it legal at 61 wasn't a career move; it was something closer to a private reckoning about which name he wanted to be the true one. That reasoning is the part still open to argue about, and the record, so far, leaves it to interpretation.