Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage (born 1964) is an American actor who won the Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas and built one of Hollywood’s most singular careers — swinging between blockbusters, cult oddities, and late-career acclaim in films like Pig and Dream Scenario, where he played a man who involuntarily appears in strangers’ dreams.

“Protect your instrument”

Cage’s alarm crystallized after his 2023 cameo as Superman in The Flash: he told Yahoo Entertainment that what appeared on screen was substantially different from what he actually filmed, with digital work reshaping his brief appearance. In the same interview he delivered his now-famous verdict — AI is “a nightmare to me,” and “inhumane.”

In October 2024, accepting an award at the Newport Beach Film Festival, he turned the grievance into a warning for the next generation. He urged young actors to guard against studios acquiring “employment-based digital replicas” — EBDRs — telling them the technology “wants to take your instrument” and coining an acronym for what must be protected: MVMFMBMI — “my voice, my face, my body, my imagination — my performance.”

Cage has also said he fears being digitally puppeteered after death. His stance is visceral and personal rather than legalistic — less about union contracts than about the sanctity of the actor’s body as the medium of the art, a theme echoed across the profession from Keanu Reeves to Scarlett Johansson.