“Nicolas Cage Reveals He Likely Went Unpaid for Oscar-Winning Role in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ — Unfazed by Financials”
Nicolas Cage may have left a paycheck behind when he was leaving Las Vegas.
Nicolas Cage said it’s probably true he didn’t get paid for “Leaving Las Vegas.”
The role won him his one and only Oscar in 1996.
But he doesn’t care, because he “absolutely had to play” the part.
The actor, who played suicidal alcoholic screenwriter Ben Sanderson in the 1995 film “Leaving Las Vegas,” was largely unbothered when asked about the fact that he may not have gotten paid for his Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning role.
On the red carpet at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on Monday, the actor confirmed to Business Insider that it’s “probably true” he didn’t get paid for the movie.
“But I haven’t been thinking about it,” Cage said.
The story first came to light when writer-director Mike Figgis recalled in 2022 on The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast that he and Cage never actually got paid the $100,000 apiece they were owed for their work on the movie because the company that financed the film said it “never went into profit” — despite earning $32 million at the box office against a $4 million budget.
Figgis wasn’t concerned by the lack of pay, telling THR that his career — and Cage’s — took off after the critical success of “Leaving Las Vegas,” winning them awards and much bigger paydays for future projects.
Cage told BI he feels similarly.
“I got to play a part that I absolutely had to play,” he told BI. “There was no doubt in my mind that it would be an experience and a great movie. I wasn’t gonna stop — whether they paid me or not, I was making the movie.”
Cage, who was at SXSW for the premiere of his latest movie “Arcadian,” is known for his love of film as an art form and his offbeat role choices. He told BI that he’s gravitated toward the horror genre in movies like “Mandy,” “Willy’s Wonderland,” and now “Arcadian” because of the films he loved in his youth.
“I grew up watching Hammer horror films. I also grew up watching the old German expressionists, and I grew up watching Lon Chaney,” Cage said. “I’m kind of a natural-born surrealist of sorts — I gravitate toward surreal paintings, surreal music, and surreal avant-garde performance art.”
While “Arcadian,” an action horror film in which Cage stars as a father desperately trying to keep his twin boys alive in a post-apocalyptic world filled with deadly monsters, is more “photo-realistic” in its approach, Cage teased that his upcoming horror movie “Longlegs” is more surrealistic.
“Everyone seems to want to believe that 1970s naturalism is the arbiter of that which is considered great acting. Well, yes, it is, but it’s also not only that,” Cage told BI. “If you go into the horror genre — not in ‘Arcadian’ so much, but ‘Longlegs’ you’ll see — you can be a surrealistic performance artist.”
“Arcadian,” directed by Ben Brewer and written by Cage’s longtime agent and producing partner Mike Nilon, is in theaters April 12.
