Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/A24
There’s long been more than one Nicolas Cage, not only in the sense that the actor has for decades been a big-screen chameleon, but also with regards to the fact that the Oscar-winner’s internet fame has created a memeified persona that often feels divorced from the actual man and artist. Thus, Cage is the ideal person to play an ordinary American who becomes a ubiquitous overnight celebrity—and grapples with the pluses and minuses of that lofty status, over which he has little control—in Dream Scenario, a metaphysical satire about a college professor who, for inexplicable reasons, begins appearing in everyone’s dreams. For Cage’s Paul Matthews, it’s a simultaneously exhilarating and nightmarish situation, and it’s one that writer/director Kristoffer Borgli plumbs for loopy laughs and sharp jabs at our warped contemporary reality.
Produced by Ari Aster and A24, Dream Scenario is another in a string of recent Cage efforts—commencing with 2021’s phenomenal Pig—that demonstrate that the star is far more than simply the outrageous wild man that social media’s bite-sized video clips suggest. Like 2022’s amusingly self-parodic The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, it’s a film that takes advantage of Cage’s real-world reputation and standing for fictional madness, which here takes off once Paul becomes intimately familiar to the world and, shortly thereafter, discovers that the spotlight can be a cruel place for those unprepared for the inevitable backlash.
Poking fun at viral popularity and cancel culture with quasi-surreal strangeness, it’s an off-kilter affair electrified by Cage’s turn as a less-than-well-adjusted nobody who learns that becoming a somebody isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With the film now expanded into wide release, we spoke with the inimitable legend about his productive and diverse 2023, the parallels between Dream Scenario and his own life, and his surprising thoughts about retiring from the movies in the not-too-distant future.