Nicolas Cage Says He's 'a Little Bit Homeless' After Malibu Sinkhole

The collapse on Malibu's Sea Level Drive led the city to red-tag 31 residences, seven of them for structural damage.

Someone at Los Angeles Comic Con asked Nicolas Cage on Saturday what he had planned for Halloween. His answer started with the fact that he doesn't currently have a front door.

“I’m currently a little bit homeless,” the Oscar winner told the panel crowd, The Hollywood Reporter reported Tuesday. “Something happened to my house in Malibu, so I’m just sort of living in hotels.” So there'd be no trick-or-treaters at his door this year, he said.

He still had a plan. He'd take his 4-year-old daughter, August, trick-or-treating somewhere in Santa Monica, and once she was asleep he'd put on The Shining. He noted that the film had earned its director a Razzie nomination, of all things, for worst director. “He directed the hell out of that movie,” Cage said, according to the trade.

The thing that happened to his house was a sinkhole. It opened Sept. 8 at his $10.5 million beachfront home, damaging the deck and swallowing a chunk of his driveway, The Hollywood Reporter said. The hole ran about 25 to 30 feet down and spread 30 feet by 60. No one was reported hurt.

Malibu's own response shows how much of the street went with it. Citing the city's press release and emergency proclamation, the Santa Monica Mirror reported that the Malibu Building Safety Division red-tagged seven properties on Sea Level Drive because the collapse had damaged them structurally. The city tagged 24 more because the wrecked roadway left no safe way to drive in, for 31 residences in all.

It was a very bad road by then. According to the Mirror, fire officials said a fire engine couldn't fit on the strip of street that survived. Sheriff's deputies knocked on doors to order people out, gas crews shut off service after a leak, and the American Red Cross set up a shelter in Malibu High School. That same day, Malibu's acting emergency services director put the city under a local emergency.

Nobody has said for sure why the ground gave way. Hurricane Marie, the unusually strong storm that hit California in early September, is the likely cause, Variety reported, though officials haven't pinned down how the hole formed. Its swells pushed flooding into some beachfront houses in Southern California.

Meanwhile his work hasn't slowed. Variety noted that Cage is set for Season 5 of HBO’s True Detective alongside Antonio Banderas, and that he plays the football coach John Madden in Amazon MGM’s Madden, out Nov. 11. He's getting ready for both while living out of hotels.

The coast he's waiting to go back to doesn't get a break this winter. On the day the street was evacuated, the Mirror reported that NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center gave a strengthening El Niño better than 90% odds of lasting through fall and winter. The Mirror said that pattern could bring record-high water and serious flooding to the Southern California shoreline.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, retrieved November 4, 2026. Other sources: smmirror.com, Variety.