It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Nicolas Cage!
Cage revealed to Yahoo! Entertainment Wednesday that he filmed a very different cameo as the Man of Steel for DC’s “The Flash” compared to the one that made the final cut.
“First and foremost, I was on set,” Cage, 59, said, dispelling rumors that the footage of the “National Treasure” star was simply a repurposed costume test from Tim Burton’s never-made film “Superman Lives.”
“What I was supposed to do was literally just be standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe.” Cage continued. “Kal-El was bearing witness [to] the end of a universe, and you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey.”
“I had no dialogue [so had to] convey with my eyes the emotion. So that’s what I did. I was on set for maybe three hours,” the “Moonstruck” actor added.
However, when the “Raising Arizona” star went to see the film in theaters, he was shocked to find out that the scene he had filmed had been replaced with a more action-packed sequence.
“When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider,” Cage recalled. “I did not do that. That was not what I did.”
Cage said he does not believe that the studio used artificial intelligence to recreate him, pinning the blame instead on computer-generated imagery.
“It was CGI, OK, so that they could de-age me, and I’m fighting a spider,” Cage continued. “I didn’t do any of that, so I don’t know what happened there.”
“But I don’t think it [was] AI [in ‘The Flash’]. I just think that they did something with it, and again, it’s out of my control,” the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” actor stated. “I literally went to shoot a scene for maybe an hour in the suit, looking at the destruction of a universe and trying to convey the feelings of loss and sadness and terror in my eyes. That’s all I did.”
The Post reached out to Cage and Warner Bros. for comment.
Even as opposition to the use of AI to recreate actors has featured as a major rallying point in the SAG-AFTRA strike, the use of the terrifying technology is becoming increasingly prevalent.
On Wednesday, “Avengers” star Scarlett Johansson sued the company behind the app Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar after it used her face and voice in a 22-second advertisement without the star’s consent.
According to Variety, the now-deleted clip used a snippet of an video featuring Johansson, 38, during a behind-the-scenes look at her film “Black Widow.”
The clip then transitions to AI-generated images of the actress, while a voice near-identical to Johansson’s is heard on the soundtrack.
Johansson’s lawyer told Variety: “We do not take these things lightly. Per our usual course of action in these circumstances, we will deal with it with all legal remedies that we will have.”
In October, Tom Hanks also fell victim to AI after a video promoting a dental plan surfaced featuring the actor’s digital doppelgänger.
“Beware!!” Hanks, 67, wrote underneath a photo of his lookalike. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me.”
“I have nothing to do with it,” the “Forrest Gump” star added.
Cage has come out strongly against the use of AI as well.
“AI is a nightmare to me. It’s inhumane,” he said Wednesday. “You can’t get more inhumane than artificial intelligence.”
