Nicolas Cage on Memes, Myths, and Why He Thinks AI Is a 'Nightmare'

Nicolas Cage knows he's a meme. After making the mistake of googling himself a few years back, the charismatic actor discovered that his big on-screen performances had been translated into single-frame quips and supercuts, taken--like all memes, really--out of context, played for lolz, and in a manner that, frankly, makes Cage seem like a graduate from the Jim Carrey school of rubber-faced acting. "Something like'Nick Cage loses his shit,' where they cherry-pick meltdowns from different movies I'd made over the years," he says. "I get that it's all done for laughs, and in that context it is funny, but at the same time, there's no regard to how the character got there. This, Cage says, is not why he got into making movies.