“It wasn’t written for me”: Nicolas Cage opens up about Lionsgate Play’s Dream Scenario

Versatility is undeniably his middle name! With a career spanning 43 years and over 100 films, Nicolas Cage is known for phenomenal acting prowess and grit as an actor. The Leaving Las Vegas star is a genre in his own. From action, drama, sci-fi and horror – the Academy Award winner is a jack of all trades and a master of them all too! Ready to wow audiences with yet another riveting performance, Cage’s latest film Dream Scenario is set to make its digital premiere in India exclusively on Lionsgate Play this 19th April.

A story of dreams becoming intertwined with reality, the film sees a series of unexpected events that lead Paul Matthews’ to become famous overnight, but not for the right reasons – something Cage personally relates to.

Talking about why he chose the film and his exposure to meme-culture, Nicolas Cage said, “I went through this experience online in 2008-2009. I don’t know exactly when, but I woke up one morning – I might have been the first actor it happened to – I googled my name, stupidly. It’s kind of a sickness. There was this video called ‘Nicolas Cage loses his crap’. It was chaired by this guy – Jerry, who picked all my freakout moments and movies and cobbled them together without any regard for Act 1 or Act 2 – or how the character got to that point of crisis, and they just simply made it – Nick Cage is a freak and he’s freaking out. So that became viral around the world so many times more than it says, because it had to reload and go again. It led to what is – what I learned is meme-ification. I had not been familiar with memes before. There were T-shirts with all kinds of ‘you don’t say’ from Vampire’s Kiss. It was confusing. It was stimulating. It was frustrating, because there was nothing, I could do to stop it.”

Also read: Priya Mani on her chemistry with Ajay Devgn in Maidaan: “It just happened very organically”

Further elaborating, the actor added, “Long story short, I had to take those feelings of frustration and the weight, if you will, and put them somewhere. That’s what I do as an actor. And I’ve read Dream Scenario and I said – yes. It wasn’t written for me, it was written probably for somebody else but I knew how the character felt; he doesn’t look like me, he doesn’t sound like me, he doesn’t move like me, he doesn’t dress like me – but he is experiencing something that’s similar. I knew I could play the part authentically because of that. If I had not gone through that experience, I would not have been able to play Paul effectively.”