26 Highlights From Nicolas Cage’s “Ask Me Anything” Session

This occasion feels even more special since you can't simply follow Cage.

"I hate social media," he bluntly told MarketWatch in 2018. "I'm from another time. I'm kicking and screaming. I don't have Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram."

"I wanna maintain whatever golden age, mysterious aura I can keep because I don't want to be a part of that club," he said.

Cage added that online connection is nothing compared to the one we can have in the natural world. "Everything is a tweet now," he said. "It's disappointing, especially for someone like me. I wanna meet people, I want to have a conversation. I'm not interested in Instagram!"

Regardless, he is one of the more popular personas on the internet. As GQ highlighted, around 2010, when Cage's career and finances started to suffer, his performances—which, while colorful, were at least mostly tuned to the movies they were in—were plucked out of context and spliced together into clips like Nicolas Cage Freak-Out Montage and 40 clips of Nicolas Cage screaming in one minute.

Cage took umbrage when he first saw all the image edits and supercuts all those years ago, but has more or less accepted them by now.

"You can't go against that which is," he said. But every stick has two ends. The internet lore, as outrageous as it can be, has, in its own way, made him more beloved than before.

His fans even created a subreddit for him, or should we say an altar. It's called r/onetruegod and its members say they "collect all content relating to the Cage, through which we hope to discern His Holy Word."

We managed to get in touch with the moderators of r/onetruegod, and one of them, u/enfrozt, was kind enough to have a little chat with us.

"I think Nick Cage is so popular [on the internet] because of his breadth of work, and his electric performances when he's doing any part, small or large," u/enfrozt told Bored Panda. "There isn't a year gone by where he hasn't released a movie that intrigues audiences, and many that are just incredibly fun to watch. The AMA felt genuine, and you could tell that each answer would be better than the last."

"Nick Cage is a master of his craft, but he's also a humble film enthusiast himself. He cares very much about the audience's enjoyment and experience of the movie," the mod continued, adding a quote by another Redditor, u/cyllibi: 'It shouldn't have surprised me, but I was really impressed about his depth of knowledge into his craft. This man respects acting in a way I don't think most performers do.'

GQ called Cage "a true eccentric holdout in the increasingly banal landscape of American celebrity." And they make a good point. He's not posting ridiculous TikToks or giving pithy sound bites on a red carpet.

u/enfrozt also agrees with this statement. "I think this is very on point for describing Nick Cage," they said. "He isn't a celebrity that you would consider to be apathetic with where he's gotten in life. You can tell with each new movie that he's committed to crafting a performance that is the best he can, and it doesn't seem like he's slowing down any time soon.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the movie to which we are thankful for this AMA, premiered at the South by Southwest film festival last month and hits theaters worldwide at the end of April. However, when Cage first heard the premise of the movie, he was vaguely offended.

In writer-director Tom Gormican's comedy, a fictionalized, egocentric, down-on-his-luck version of him accepts a $1 million offer from a wealthy mega-fan (Pedro Pascal) to attend a party in Spain and finds himself in a real-life action-adventure and tumbling down a rabbit hole of references to his past roles.

"I turned it down three or four times," Cage told The Hollywood Reporter.

"I wanted no part of it," the actor continued. "But when I got Tom's letter, then I thought, 'OK, he's not just trying to mock so-called Nick Cage; there is a real interest in some of the earlier work.' His tone was more of a celebration of some of [the actor's iconic onscreen] moments — like being at the bottom of the pool in Leaving Las Vegas or [using] the gold guns in Face/Off."

Ironically, what really hooked Cage was a part that is no longer in the movie. "It was a sequence where the Nick Cage character goes into a series of vignettes that are all stylized in the German expressionism of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. So there was a sequence in black and white that was a Gone in 60 Seconds race in a Mustang, there was the Leaving Las Vegas character in a hotel room. It was fun to make and cool to look at," the actor said.

"Ultimately, the studio decided it was too far out for audiences."

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