Nicolas Cage is a huge Prince fan. He called the legendary musician “one of his heroes” (he once asked if he could take a photo with him, and while Prince said no, “I understood and I still love him”) and performed a “primal-scream therapy” version of “Purple Rain” at a karaoke bar around the third anniversary of his death. The clip went viral, “and that became everybody’s business,” the actor told the New York Times in 2019. “There was a recent breakup. I don’t really want to talk about it. I was pretty upset about that and the way things happened.” The experience left Cage so rattled that he’s done with karaoke.
“For me, karaoke was like therapy,” Cage said during a conversation with Peter Dinklage, Andrew Garfield, Jonathan Majors, and Simon Rex for the Hollywood Reporter, “until someone videotaped my punk-rock version of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ and it went everywhere and I said, ‘I’m not going to karaoke anymore.’ Karaoke’s supposed to be private. It’s like a prayer.” (He should have sang Madonna instead.)
Garfield joked that Cage is “using this platform to get out his gripes” about the person who leaked the video. The culprit remains unknown, but it’s a shame the performance was released to the public when this scene from Face/Off already exists.
Now that’s how you karaoke.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)