He's glad that the comic book character he's ended up playing in a movie is a favourite from childhood, Nicolas Cage tells Steve Pratt.

But the actor reveals he wouldn't consider doing another superhero... unless Ghost Rider rides again in a sequel.

NICOLAS Cage was slated to play Superman but was glad he ended up playing another comic book hero Ghost Rider. "I was going to play Superman for a bit there, and for whatever reasons the movie fell apart," he says.

"When I saw the new Superman film I realised that, while I liked the movie and I really liked Brandon Routh in it, it was a much more traditional, nostalgic portrayal. I was going to turn the character on his ear and try to do something new with it.

"So, with Ghost Rider, being that he was the comic I was reading as a boy - along with the Hulk - and I was really more of a Marvel aficionado, it was the right choice.

"Plus he was a character that I was able to really introduce to people, and put my own twist on it to bring it to life. I wasn't in any way constricted like I might have been with a character like Superman. Mark was very open to allowing me to try to make it funny and somehow real. How would this character try to keep the demons at bay? I could have fun with that.

He reckons that this was the one he was destined to do. "I played it a million times already, as a boy" he says.

" I had all the rehearsal I needed. I brought that comic book home with me and I would sit in my bedroom and stare at it. My older brother thought there was something wrong with me.

"I think in a weird way it gave me control over my bad dreams. It made it so that I could have my bad dreams work for me instead of against me. That not all that looks scary is evil. Ghost Rider, in my opinion, is all good."

He spent time considering how to have fun with the character, who on screen is seen drinking jelly bean cocktails and listening to Karen Carpenter records.

I was trying to figure out a way that I could have fun with it and not take it too seriously. But also, believably, what would someone do if they were trying to not succumb to dark forces," says Cage.

"He sure wouldn't invite them in, he wouldn't be drinking gin out of a Martini glass. He wouldn't be listening to Black Sabbath, he'd be listening to the angelic voice of Karen Carpenter. And he wouldn't be watching violent horror films, he'd be watching chimpanzees doing karate, and trying to be in his own little bubble so the Devil can't get to him."

The Peter Fonda influence is undeniable. "Peter Fonda is the reason I became a motorcyclist. I saw Easy Rider and I bought a motorcycle the next day, and I rode it all the way from LA to San Francisco. I almost had an accident on the Golden Gate Bridge, with a gust of wind. I turned around and rode it back home, and I became Easy Rider in my own mind. So he was a perfect choice," he says.

Of course, as a Hollywood star, Cage wasn't allowed to do all his own stunts. "With every action oriented or adventure film, there's going to be a moment when every actor becomes a stuntman and every stuntman becomes an actor," he says.

"You try to do as much of it as you can, but inevitably the studio wants you to finish the movie. So you've got to slow down and you're really got to defer to your team to make sure you do. There are some things I can't do on a motorcycle, I haven't been riding bikes since I was a three-year-old like Rob Jones has.

"But when I saw him in Australia do these acrobatics, really like a dance; front wheelies, back wheelies and all that, I said we had to find a way to put that into the movie and have it be a flirtation. This is how Johnny would try and court Roxanne, a little bit of showing off, a little bit of flirting with the bike. It really happened almost accidentally, and Mark said we should go for that. He put it in the movie, and it's one of my favourite sequences."

A lot of thought went into the moments of transition between Johnny Blaze and the Ghost Rider. "I was with Kevin Mack who is a genius at CGI, working out the different levels of expression that I might get up to in the sequence. The whole sequence was very collaborative. I decided early on that Johnny would, for about two or three seconds, be having more fun than anybody else in the whole world. Then at some point the pain and the agony would be replaced by ecstasy with the surge of power running through his body. But it was a confused, painful kind of ecstasy," says Cage.

"But I wanted to be operatic, I wanted it to be like an aria of pain. I kept thinking about Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and his screams in the chair. I wanted to put that in there, so it got kind of musical too but that's one of my favourite sequences in the movie, I really felt like we did something there.

"That maybe not everything that looks scary is evil or bad. That some things that may be scary at first are actually quite good. The Ghost Rider, if you look at it, is a skull. We all have one. How bad can it really be? It scares us when we see it, but it's actually quite beautiful when you understand what it is. In my opinion he is all good, he's honest, he doesn't lie about anything, he has nothing to hide."

Now Cage reckons he's done with comic strip characters. "I knew from the beginning that comic book movies would be enormously successful entertainment and they would make a lot of people happy. Batman, Superman and Spider-Man were the big three, they need no introduction, but the one I feel very blessed to have done was Ghost Rider because he is the most personal to me, and the most interesting.

"I really have nothing more to say about comic books or comic book movies, unless we come up with a great script for a sequel, this is who I'm going to be in this genre."

* Ghost Rider opens in cinemas on.