The 'Butcher's Crossing' star and wife Riko Shibata welcomed a baby girl earlier this month.
Nicolas Cage is learning to be a girl dad, and he's thrilled about it!
While on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting his new Western drama, Butcher's Crossing, Cage spoke to ET's Rachel Smith and opened up about life as a new father. He and wife Riko Shibata welcomed their first child together earlier this month, August Francesca Coppola Cage, and the new father's relearning that sleep's going to be hard to come by as a new dad.
"Well, I actually had about five hours sleep and total over five days," he said. "So I was getting one hour a night. And then I came here and I actually got five hours last night, so I think that's what brought me back for this."
This is the first child for Shibata, while Cage is already a dad to Weston, 31, and Kal-El, 16, from previous relationships. As a new girl dad, he's ready to soak it all in.
"I want to learn, you know," he said. "I want to learn."
Cage also dished on the meaning behind his daughter's name, though Cage fans and movie buffs may have figured it out rather quickly.
"Well, my father is August and my uncle is [director] Francis [Ford Coppola] and I wanted to honor both of them," Cage said.
In Butcher's Crossing, Cage shaved his head for the role, and he said he loved it. But probably not as much as he loves Westerns. He's a big fan, and explains what separates Butcher's Crossing from the rest of them.
"I think there's a great legacy in history to the Western in American cinema," he said. "There have been so many classics like The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon with Gary Cooper, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. But I will say that this movie is a little different. Yes, it's the same time, the same place but it's dealing more with a kind of a thematic of characters and the human condition that's applicable to anytime really, and I think it's happening still right now with what's going on with the environment with trees. And this is pretty hard to watch because we're dealing with the the near extinction of the American buffalo. So that's what this is about, and how we got there."
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