The only role Nicolas Cage felt compelled to play
Nicolas Cage spent a decade taking roles for little other reason than the money, but there's only one part he's ever felt he had to play at all costs.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Film » Cutting Room Floor
Fri 17 January 2025 21:45, UK
It’s absolutely not a coincidence that Nicolas Cage being debt-free has coincided with a resurgence that’s already in with a chance of being remembered as the most fruitful period of the eccentric actor’s long, successful, and wildly eclectic career.
He’d be the first to admit he spent far too long chasing the paycheque, but he did at least approach his wilderness years with characteristic gusto. Cage made an alarming number of straight-to-video genre flicks during that period, and yet he never phoned it in. Sure, the movies themselves were awful, and nobody remembers half of them even existed, but he was never going through the motions.
That’s the maverick in microcosm: he’ll always be 100% invested in each and every part he plays, whether he’s dialling it down for a quiet drama or devouring the scenery in a by-the-numbers actioner. Cage could never be accused of phoning it in, turning up and doing the bare minimum, or sleepwalking through any production, regardless of whether his reasons for doing it in the first place were financially motivated or not.
However, it would be fair to say he’s back, and in a big way. Recent turns in Panos Cosmatos’ phantasmagorical Mandy, a stoically silent turn in Willy’s Wonderland, a batshit burst of bravura in Prisoners of the Ghostland, the self-referential stylings of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the introspective Pig, and the sinister Longlegs are the work of an actor reborn.
Convincing Cage to star in a movie isn’t the most difficult thing to achieve in Hollywood, considering he’s appeared in at least two pictures every year since 2008, but there’s only one he had to play at all costs. Fittingly, it earned him his first major awards season recognition in two decades when he made the shortlist for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ at the Golden Globes, and he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration.
Kristoffer Borgli’s surrealist fantasy Dream Scenario stars Cage as Paul Matthews, a man who takes the meaning of going viral to new levels when he suddenly starts appearing in the dreams of people around the world. No actor knows more about being reduced to a walking meme in the eyes of the public better than the subject of countless videos predicated entirely on him losing his shit, which is precisely why he was so drawn to the story.
“I knew right away I just had to make this movie,” he told Film Ink. “I felt like I had the life experience to play Paul because of what had happened to me virally. I think I might have been the first actor – maybe it was 2008 or 2009 – who woke up one morning and made the mistake of Googling himself.”
Reflecting on his unexpected reinvention as an internet icon, Cage lamented how the videos were “just cherry-picking all these sort of crisis moments of different characters that I had played, without any regard for the narrative or how the character reached that point.” He’d already lived Dream Scenario, and there was no way he’d let anybody else lead the cast.
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