Few actors alive or dead have created a body of work as fascinating and outrageous as Nicolas Cage. As rich as his resumé is, it has also opened him up to a very particular form of attention on the Internet. “I might have been the first actor who went through a kind of meme-ification,” he says in a new interview with The Guardian. “One person had cherrypicked from all these different movies where I was having meltdowns, but without any regard for how the character got to that place. I was frustrated because I didn’t know what people were taking from the movies other than that.”
Whatever you may think of the result, Cage is a guy who cares about the craft, so having his work get decontextualized in that way didn’t sit well. “I didn’t understand how to process what was happening. I got into acting because I was moved by film performance more than any other art form. I didn’t get into movies to become a meme. That was new. I made friends with it but it was an adjustment,” the Oscar winner explains. “I thought maybe they would compel someone to go back and look at the movies. But I had no control over it.”
The silver lining is that the consummate actor could translate the experience into his work. “The same thing happens with Paul in Dream Scenario: he has no control over this inexplicable phenomenon,” Cage says of his latest film, directed by Kristopher Borgli.
Speaking on the topic when the film premiered earlier this year at TIFF (via Deadline), Cage says he kept looking at the “Nicolas Cage Loses His Shit” compilation and thinking “‘What is happening to me?’” He shared, “I sat there, and it started going in this memeification, with photoshopping and T-shirts, and I said, ‘I gotta put this somewhere, and then I read Dream Scenario and I said ‘Yes, now I can turn this lead into a little bit of gold!’”