Nicolas Cage is aware of he’s a meme. He’s not comfortable about it. After making the error of googling himself just a few years again, the charismatic actor found that his huge on-screen performances had been translated into single-frame quips and supercuts, taken—like all memes, actually—out of context, performed for lolz, and in a way that, frankly, makes Cage appear to be a graduate from the Jim Carrey faculty of rubber-faced performing.
“One thing like ‘Nick Cage loses his shit,’ the place they cherry-pick meltdowns from totally different motion pictures I’d made over time,” he says. “I get that it’s all finished for laughs, and in that context it’s humorous, however on the identical time, there’s no regard to how the character received there. There’s no Act One, there’s no Act Two.”
This, Cage says, shouldn’t be why he received into making motion pictures. Again within the Eighties, when he was displaying up in Quick Instances at Ridgemont Excessive and because the romantic lead in Valley Lady, there was no web, nobody turning him into a TikTok template. “So, as I’ve watched these memes develop exponentially and get became T-shirts and ‘You don’t say?’ and all that stuff,” Cage says, “I’ve simply thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know the way I ought to really feel about this,’ as a result of it’s made me type of pissed off and confused.”
That’s a part of the rationale Cage signed on to do his newest film, the A24 drama Dream Scenario, wherein he performs Paul Matthews, a downtrodden college professor who out of the blue begins to seem within the desires of hundreds of thousands of individuals all over the world. Directed by Sick of Myself’s Kristoffer Borgli, the movie is a intelligent have a look at the trimmings of instantaneous fame and at what it appears like when somebody’s fame turns into greater than they could be themselves—one thing Cage, who really modified his identify and leaned right into a extra bombastic persona early in his profession, is aware of a bit one thing about.
To mark Dream Situation’s launch, WIRED talked to Cage about the place he’s at along with his meme-ification as of late, his dislike of social media, and why he’s going to make rattling certain that nobody could make an AI-generated Nick Cage after he shuffles off this mortal coil.
WIRED: Over the course of the film, Paul struggles with who he thinks he’s and who the world thinks he’s, and the way that’s continuously shifting round him. Is that one thing you’ve needed to cope with over the course of your profession when it comes to “Nick Cage, Hollywood actor” versus “Nicolas Coppola, father and human being”?