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Though casting for Face/Off 2 has not yet been officially announced, it’s been confirmed that Nicholas Cage will be returning for the sequel to the action film originally directed by John Woo. Now it’s rumored that John Travolta, who co-starred with Cage in that original 1997 movie, has agreed to participate.

In that original Face/Off movie, written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, FBI agent Sean Archer and terrorist-for-hire Castor Troy undergo surgery to swap their faces, which on a deeper level led to wholesale confusion about their identities. Werb and Colleary were inspired to write the film when a mutual friend was seriously injured in a hang-gliding accident, requiring his face to be removed and reconstructed in an experimental surgical procedure.

It had been announced back in 2021 that Adam Wingard would be directing the upcoming sequel, which got delayed due to the Writers’ Guild strike in 2023. Wingard has recently been quoted as saying, “Look, I mean, like, the only way that we’re going to do this really is if we get, you know, the original cast. I’m not going to say how it works or anything, but like, it’s got to be 100% the real follow up not just like some fan service movie, not just some like ca-ching thing, this has to feel like the ultimate follow up to the original film.”

Nicolas Cage has confirmed that he recently met with Wingard to discuss possible scenarios for Face/Off 2, which may involve a plot twist that could include the children of the two protagonists, Archer and Troy.

Speaking to Collider about the project, Cage said that “I think Face/Off is a sequel that lends itself to a lot of twists and turns and unpredictability. It’s almost like if you factor in the idea of offspring and Castor and Sean having children and these children grow up, then it becomes like three-dimensional chess, and then it’s not just the two, John Travolta and myself, it’s four of us ping-ponging and going at different levels, and it becomes even more complex. I think there’s a lot of fertile ground there. I had maybe one meeting in an office, but I haven’t heard anything since, so I don’t know.”

John Woo’s original Face/Off is currently streaming for free on Pluto TV and The Roku Channel and is also available for streaming on Paramount+ and Peacock.

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