Plus, Waggoner hung out with Cage a bunch. “We spent a lot of time together. Some actors, they come in, they’re very methodical, they won’t get out of character — they’re sort of the Jim Carrey crazy types. Nic, he’s able to just have a conversation with you — like, we’re talking about what kind of wine that we were going to have, and then, ‘Nic, ready for you on set,’ and he would just go right into the character and just go out there and be fabulous. He’d come back and just go back into the conversation like it never happened. He was really good like that.”
When Adaptation opened December 6, 2002, it wasn’t a huge hit, but it got great reviews and earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Cage. (Chris Cooper, playing the titular orchid thief of Orlean’s book, won for Best Supporting Actor.) The film helped Waggoner raise his profile as a hairstylist as well. “Sometimes you think these big films that I’ve done would help me,” he says, “but it’s the smaller films. I’ve gotten more jobs off of Adaptation and just small, random films.”
Along those lines, he and Cage went on to do several more projects together over the next few years, including National Treasure and Cage’s directorial debut, Sonny. “He always loved dark hair (for his characters),” Waggoner says, “but I’d be like, ‘Nic, you’ve got this really light skin, and this really black hair sometimes is overpowering — it’s not the best hair color for you. We should go with the browns and maybe some highlights or something.’ Anytime that you go onto another project with somebody — whether it be a director or an actor — obviously they believe you can do this, or you wouldn’t be there.”
They haven’t worked together in recent years, but not that long ago, Waggoner went to New Orleans to work on the new series adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. “It was a big period show, so I was pulling out lots of old wigs,” he says, “and I pulled out one of Nic’s boxes of wigs. These are wigs from National Treasure, all these wigs.” Sadly, the Adaptation wigs aren’t there. (Waggoner thinks he had to give those back to Sony, which put out the film.) But he also found some Polaroids of hair and wig tests he’d done with Cage during those years. “It was Nic, just 20 years younger. That’s been a long time ago.”
Waggoner laughs at the memory. “I don’t have too many photographs of me with Nic, because we were drinking a lot. I’ve never partied so much with an actor. He was great. I had the time of my life with that guy.”