Nicolas Cage Reveals He Was Digitally Scanned For Spider-Man Noir Series
And he’s rightfully terrified of the “AI” proliferating Hollywood right now
Nicolas Cage is terrified of what Hollywood calls “AI” right now, according to his recent interview with The New Yorker. It comes up as he was forced to end said interview early because he had scheduled digital body scans for two projects. Those projects include the MGM+ and Prime Video series Noir, where he’s playing the lead role of Spider-Man Noir. It will be the first major scripted television role of his career, and he’s hoping they won’t be abused as reference for AI technology to recreate his image in the posthumous eternity.
As he described it “I have to slip out after this to go get a scan done for the show, and then also for the movie I’m doing after the show. Two scans in one day! They have to put me in a computer and match my eye color and change — I don’t know,” he said. “They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via digital AI. … God, I hope not AI. I’m terrified of that. I’ve been very vocal about it. … And it makes me wonder, you know, where will the truth of the artists end up? Is it going to be replaced? Is it going to be transmogrified? Where’s the heartbeat going to be? I mean, what are you going to do with my body and my face when I’m dead? I don’t want you to do anything with it!”
Talking about the move to television, he admitted the platform was never enticing to him before, after all his uncle Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t directed much in his decades in the industry, but “what interested me was the time I could take expressing something.” He then gave an interesting example that nudged him in its direction: “I saw Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad stare at a suitcase for half the episode. Just him on the floor looking at a suitcase thinking, ‘What’s in it? Do I do this? Don’t I do it?’ I thought, ‘We don’t have time to do that in movies.’ So that to me seemed like an opportunity to open it up a little.”
He then started talking about Noir, if not always directly, saying “I don’t know if the project that I’m exploring has room for that. I think this is a much more sort of popcorn-entertainment episodic.” He revealed the series (first season?) is eight episodes and “more of a Pop-art mashup, like a Lichtenstein painting” with “some sparkle to it”. Cage originally played a Spider-Man Noir in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and seems about to reprise it for the third film Beyond the Spider-Verse, but all indications are that the series iteration won't be a Peter Parker variant, so it’s not even down to a minutia of distinguishing traits. The series was recently reported to have added its second cast member, with Lamorne Morris as Robbie Robertson.
Source: Variety