Kal-El Coppola: How Did Nicolas Cage's Son Get His Name?

Celebrities are known for coming up with rare baby names, but it's not every day that a child shares their moniker with Superman himself. When Nicolas Cage welcomed his second child with his third wife, Alice Kim, in 2005, the happy couple decided to name him Kal-El Coppola Cage. If you're not the biggest Superman fan, Kal-El is the legendary superhero's real name before he is adopted by the Kents and given the human name, Clark. Naturally, fans assumed that the "Face/Off" star chose it because he was a fan. 

In 1997, Cage bought a rare copy of the first Superman comic. A year later, he was cast to play the beloved character in a doomed film called "Superman Lives," before Warner Bros. shut down the project. In 2023, the Oscar winner finally got his wish to play Superman, in a cameo in "The Flash." But in May 2026, Cage set the record straight about Kal-El's origins in an interview with Entertainment Tonight (via X, formerly known as Twitter). 

"The Superman thing was just something that happened," he clarified. "It's actually a Hebrew name. It means 'Voice of God.' I always thought Kal-El is a beautiful name. So I gave him the name, but it wasn't because of some sort of enamoration or adoration of Superman." In case you're wondering, his son reportedly loves the unusual moniker.

Nicolas Cage's two other children were given non-superhero names, Weston and August Francesca Cage Coppola, but Kal-El Coppola Cage isn't the only member of the family named after a superhero. The "Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent's" birth name was actually Nicolas Coppola. As such, Nicolas Cage is related to Francis Ford Coppola and the entire, world-famous Coppola filmmaking family. But at the start of his acting career, Nicolas Cage changed his name.

"I had to reinvent myself," the Oscar winner reasoned to The Talks in 2014. "I am still legally Nicolas Coppola, but I am Nicolas Cage. [...] As soon as I went into the casting office under a new name and they didn't know that there was a connection and I got the part, I was like, 'I can really do this.'" The new surname, Cage, actually had two inspirations: Luke Cage, a Marvel superhero with unbreakable skin and John Cage, a 20th-century composer whom his family admired.

But the actor was not satisfied with solely using Cage as his stage name. "I changed my name legally last year," the "Leaving Las Vegas" star confirmed to Variety in May 2026, "I'm Nick Cage in life, and I'm Nick Cage on camera. 'Tis better to be the patriarch of my own little family than the clown cousin on the margins of someone else's, so I decided I'm going to bring it on and be 'Cage.'"