Nicolas Cage said in an interview for The New Yorker that he is terrified of AI and is hoping recent body scans he had to do for two upcoming projects aren’t used as reference for AI technology to recreate him on screen after his death.
Cage is currently attached to star in MGM+ and Amazon Prime Video’s live-action Spider-Man Noir series, which would bring him back into the tentpole space and give him his most prominent television role to date. He admitted that television was never appealing to him, but “what interested me was the time I could take expressing something.”
“I saw Bryan Cranston in ‘Breaking Bad’ stare at a suitcase for half the episode,” Cage said. “Just him on the floor looking at a suitcase thinking, ‘What’s in it? Do I do this? Don’t I do it?’ I thought, ‘We don’t have time to do that in movies.’ So that to me seemed like an opportunity to open it up a little. I don’t know if the project that I’m exploring has room for that. I think this is a much more sort of popcorn-entertainment episodic.”
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Cage was referring to the Spider-Man Noir project, which he said is “eight episodes” and “more of a Pop-art mashup, like a Lichtenstein painting” with “some sparkle to it.”
“I don’t like violence. I don’t want to play people who are hurting people. One of the things that I like about this potential show is that it’s fantasy,” he added. “It’s not really people beating people up. Monsters are involved.”
Cage also revealed that he had to end his interview with The New Yorker on the earlier side because “I have to slip out after this to go get a scan done for the show, and then also for the movie I’m doing after the show. Two scans in one day!”
“They have to put me in a computer and match my eye color and change — I don’t know,” he said. “They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via digital AI. … God, I hope not AI. I’m terrified of that. I’ve been very vocal about it. … And it makes me wonder, you know, where will the truth of the artists end up? Is it going to be replaced? Is it going to be transmogrified? Where’s the heartbeat going to be? I mean, what are you going to do with my body and my face when I’m dead? I don’t want you to do anything with it!”
Cage also said during the interview that he’s not too interested in starring in $100 million tentpoles at this point in his career, although he’s not opposed to them should the right project come his way. The Oscar winner says recent roles in indie dramas like “Pig” and “Dream Scenario” align with his career interests of telling “right in your face” human drama.
“People want to learn something from what these characters are going through. I’m interested in 50mm, right in your face — I’m interested in the psyche,” Cage said. “I want to see people going through their hardships and their celebrations and relate to it, or find something to it that makes me feel less lonely in some way. I’m not interested in, you know, a $100 million science fiction. I do love science fiction, but I’m not necessarily going to the movie for the spectacle.”
“I like movies about people—that’s just my taste—and smaller stories,” he continued. “That’s why I’ve gravitated toward independent film. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do more adventure films, or I wouldn’t do something that’s more popcorn. I’m considering it right now as we speak. But the movies that made me want to be a film actor are movies like Elia Kazan’s, or ‘Raging Bull’ — movies that were about people who were contending with the issues of life.”
Cage’s next project is Osgood Perkins’ horror movie “Longlegs,” in which the actor plays a chilling serial killer. Head over to The New Yorker’s website to read Cage’s full interview.