Once upon a time Nicolas Cage almost played his favorite superhero. In the late ‘90s there was nearly a Superman reboot. Tim Burton and Kevin Smith were involved at various points. Cage did test shoots, in a costume. Obviously it didn’t happen. But about a quarter century later he got a second chance to do it. And he’s not all that crazy about the results.
In a new chat with Yahoo!, the Oscar-winning actor opened up about his quickie cameo in The Flash, in which he can be seen as a long-haired Kal-El, shooting down a giant spider with his heat vision. Thing is, that’s not what he filmed.
“When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did,” Cage said. He said it looked like they used CGI, not AI, to “de-age me” and make it look like he’s fighting a spider. But, he added, “I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.”
Cage admitted it was all “out of my control,” but explained what he actually did when he was on-set. “I literally went to shoot a scene for maybe an hour in the suit, looking at the destruction of a universe and trying to convey the feelings of loss and sadness and terror in my eyes. That’s all I did.”
On the other hand, Cage was a lot more sanguine about the whole thing than Tim Burton.
Cage also used the occasion to make like Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, and President Joe Biden and trash artificial intelligence.
“I would be very unhappy if people were taking my art … and appropriating them,” he said. “AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane. You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence.”
Cage’s The Flash cameo is brief, taking place during a stretch where we see lots of old DC movie stars, including the late Christopher Reeve as Superman. Knowing that Cage was supposed to be doing something completely different — looking aghast at mass destruction, as it were — certainly changes the scene where he battles a giant spider, which had long been a dream of producer Jon Peters. Peters eventually got his wish with 1999’s disastrous Wild Wild West.
You can watch Cage’s The Flash bit in the video below.
(Via Yahoo!)