Back in April, video surfaced of Nicolas Cage delivering an extremely guttural rendition of Prince classic "Purple Rain" at a Los Angeles karaoke bar. The actor's performance happened to mark the third anniversary of the musical icon's passing, but many interpreted it as a healthy release in the wake of his four-day marriage/divorce saga.
Now, Cage has spoken about the karaoke clip in a new profile for The New York Times, calling his turn on the mic "more like primal-scream therapy." He elaborated as follows:
I once had brunch with Warren Beatty, and I said, 'Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you were Warren Beatty in the '70s, before everyone had a cellphone with a video camera?' He just smiled. It's so true. You go to a karaoke bar with a male friend in the neighborhood, the bar says 'no videotaping' and suddenly, there's two different videos of you doing karaoke. Who did that? Who exposed the videotape? Who sold it?
It was around the anniversary of Prince's passing. Everyone knows how much I admire him as an artist. But honestly, I wasn't even doing that to sing. It was more like primal-scream therapy. It was a holiday weekend, and I didn't want to go anywhere, but my friend who was with me said, 'You can't sit here in your apartment. You've got to go out.' So I went to the one place in my neighborhood that I knew had no video recording, just to have some fun, and that became everybody's business.
When asked by the Times what exactly he was screaming about, Cage explained, "I have to be careful about what I can divulge. 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."
He continued: "To answer your question, earlier in my career I was very specific in my concept of who I wanted to be. I saw myself as a surrealist. This is going to sound pretentious, but I was, quote, trying to invent my own mythology, unquote, around myself."
Elsewhere in the profile, Cage speaks about how he made Johnny Depp famous, spending $276,000 on a dinosaur skull and wanting to live life like Axl Rose. You can read the entire thing here.
Now, Cage has spoken about the karaoke clip in a new profile for The New York Times, calling his turn on the mic "more like primal-scream therapy." He elaborated as follows:
I once had brunch with Warren Beatty, and I said, 'Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you were Warren Beatty in the '70s, before everyone had a cellphone with a video camera?' He just smiled. It's so true. You go to a karaoke bar with a male friend in the neighborhood, the bar says 'no videotaping' and suddenly, there's two different videos of you doing karaoke. Who did that? Who exposed the videotape? Who sold it?
It was around the anniversary of Prince's passing. Everyone knows how much I admire him as an artist. But honestly, I wasn't even doing that to sing. It was more like primal-scream therapy. It was a holiday weekend, and I didn't want to go anywhere, but my friend who was with me said, 'You can't sit here in your apartment. You've got to go out.' So I went to the one place in my neighborhood that I knew had no video recording, just to have some fun, and that became everybody's business.
When asked by the Times what exactly he was screaming about, Cage explained, "I have to be careful about what I can divulge. 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."
He continued: "To answer your question, earlier in my career I was very specific in my concept of who I wanted to be. I saw myself as a surrealist. This is going to sound pretentious, but I was, quote, trying to invent my own mythology, unquote, around myself."
Elsewhere in the profile, Cage speaks about how he made Johnny Depp famous, spending $276,000 on a dinosaur skull and wanting to live life like Axl Rose. You can read the entire thing here.