Nicolas Cage, the Hollywood celebrity and the world-renown actor, is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
He is best known for his role at The Rock where he played as an FBI agent; Con Air where he was U.S. Army Ranger who accidentally killed someone; Face/Off where he and John Travolta played cat-and-mouse when they switched roles by switching their faces; Gone in 60 Seconds where he was a car thief forced to steal fifty high-end cars, the Ghost Rider films where he became the films' titular character, and more.
While Cage managed to establish himself in many mainstream films, he has past the peak of his career.
But Cage is making a comeback, and he partly thanked the internet for that.
In one occasion, Nicolas Cage said onstage that Dream Scenario was one of a few projects in his career, that after reading it and seeing it “perfect on the page,” he had to play it.
To him, this makes the film in par with some other titles he played, like being Raising Arizona, Vampire’s Kiss, and Leaving Las Vegas.
But what makes Dream Scenario unique, is how the internet influenced Cage to take the role.
The Oscar-winning actor, whose over-the-top performances and wide-eyed facial expressions have been superimposed on countless online images, said that being in Dream Scenario is a “completely different kind of role” for him.
"Well, in the name of Thespis, it was no acting please," Cage said about the role.
“I felt like I had the life experience,” the Oscar winner continued.
"What had happened to me, I might have been the first actor who woke up one morning and somebody put a montage of me having meltdown moments and freaking out, and cherry-picking from different movies and then put it online, I think it was called ‘Nicolas Cage Loses His Shit’. And then it went viral overnight around the world and I kept looking at ‘What is happening to me?’"
Talking about that video, Cage said, “It kept growing exponentially…nothing I could do, could stop it.”
“I couldn’t stop it legally; I couldn’t stop it anyway.”
“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!’”
Another way of saying this, Nicolas Cage said while promoting the movie at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), that it was his own experience being the subject of internet memes that helped him prepare for his role.
In the film, according to Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, Cage is Paul Matthews, an unremarkable suburban biologist professor and a father who becomes famous when he starts appearing in people's dreams.
"The movie is about an ordinary suburban father who's sort of a boring beta male but he does come to life in a crazy way during the movie so it was really helpful to have Nic's range to make this character really come alive," he said.
"The main inspiration is just our current culture and how people can get incredibly famous for the dumbest, strangest things without even trying. I was thinking about just like, accidentally getting famous and this seemed like a cinematic and mystical version of that."
Borgli said the Cage has "incredible range" that helped bring the absurdist tale to life.
"I'm not saying I'm unintelligent, but it's interesting when you meet someone who's half your age and twice as smart as you," Cage said of working with Borgli. "I just said, 'look this is your baby, this is your vision. I'm the remote control car - here's a remote control. You push the buttons, and I'm going where you tell me."'
Nicolas Cage has been one of the highest-paid Hollywood star, and with huge pay check, he could afford many things in life.
When he was earning more than $40 million a year, Cage owned a lot of real estates. He even had a castle, and a deserted island. At one point, Cage owned dozens of residences across the world.
Cage acquired many of the properties in a short amount of time, in what many people considered a shopping spree.
Cage was also living in luxury, and also bought many bizarre items, including a burial tomb, an octopus, shrunken pygmy heads, and a $150,000 Superman comic.
He also had a 70-million-year-old dinosaur skull, which he later had to return to the Mongolian government.
While Cage could afford all those, Cage was said to be living way beyond his means.
This was apparent when his career went past its peak, and that his star power started diminishing. This resulted to a financial ruin that forced Cage to sell many things he had. Cage then started to take roles of lesser-popular films, in order to help him financially.
Despite everything, Cage said that he didn't regret all of his purchases
"You have good investments and bad investments," Cage once said. "The good investments came from personal interest and my honest enjoyment of the history."