Nicolas Cage may have been at the center of viral memes that always flood social media, but that was never what he intended to do.
In a recent interview with The Keeperto promote the upcoming film A24 A dream storythe Oscar-winning actor admitted that at first he “didn’t understand how to handle what was happening” with all the memes and video mixes of him and the characters he played for projects.
“I got into acting because I was moved by film performance more than any other art form. I didn’t get into movies to be a meme. That was new. I made friends with him but it was a change,” he said. “I thought maybe they would get someone to go back and watch the movies. But I had no control over it. Yes the same thing happens with Paul in A dream story: he has no control over this inexplicable phenomenon.”
The film directed by Kristoffer Borgli follows Paul Matthews, an unlucky family man who finds his life turned upside down when he starts appearing in the dreams of millions of strangers. But his newfound fame gets complicated when his dreams turn into nightmares.
Earlier in the interview, Cage said he thought he might be “the first actor to go through a kind of meme-ification,” which was hard for him to wrap his head around.
“One person had chosen from these different films where I was melting, but without any attention to how the character got to that place,” he said. Renfield the actor recalled one of the video compilations he saw. “I was frustrated because I didn’t know what people were taking from the movies other than that.
Cage has also recently made headlines for his views on the use of artificial intelligence in films. “AI is a nightmare for me,” he said Yahoo! Entertainment. “It’s inhumane. You can’t be more inhuman than an artificial intelligence … I would be very unhappy if people took my art … and took [it].”
He also noted that his brief cameo in Warner Bros.’ The Flash it was very different from what he shot for the film.
“When I went to the picture, I was fighting the giant spider,” Cage explained. “I didn’t do that. That was not what I did.”
A dream story hits theaters November 10.
