Lately, Nicolas Cage has been pursuing a performance style at odds with what he calls the “meme-ification” of his screen persona, and with the support of up-and-coming directors who came into filmmaking as fans of the iconic actor. “With movies like Dream Scenario and Pig, I was trying to get closer to a more personal performance style where there’s less acting, if you will, and more being,” Cage tells me. “But you have to have material that can allow you to really express the life experiences and apply them behind the visage of another character, with another name.”

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Cage speaks of this approach with some earned confidence. We’re in a stuffy Century City greenroom, having just wrapped a panel discussion about Dream Scenario—for which he’s generating awards buzz—before an ecstatic crowd of SAG-AFTRA members. They greeted Cage with a standing ovation; they waved goodbye amid a mass ask for selfies. (Cage, of course, obliged.) The prolific star can sense this film is resonating on another level, and that reaction, along with a few other factors, has caused him to rethink his future in Hollywood. “It’s starting to solidify—I’m starting to cement my plan,” he says after I ask whether he’s reached a turning point. The gist: He’s ready to stop making films, revealing, “I may have three or four more movies left in me.”

This would amount to a rather stark shift for Cage, who has appeared in at least one feature film for 37 consecutive years and counting. That remarkable span includes his breakouts in Moonstruck and Raising Arizona, his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas, his ingenious twinning in Adaptation, and more recently, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. He’s racked up six credits in 2023 alone, ranging from cameos to leads, and just wrapped production on a handful of upcoming projects. He’s long ranked among the most ubiquitous presences in theaters—while somehow still never making a film for a streaming service—and even as he’s been candid about periods of aggressively taking jobs to pay off debts, he’s coming off of some of the richest acting experiences of his career. So why now?

“I do feel I’ve said what I’ve had to say with cinema,” he says. “I think I took film performance as far as I could.”

Cage is at a kind of personal-professional convergence. The experience of campaigning for Dream Scenario, a dark meta-comedy in which Cage’s mild-mannered professor starts popping up in strangers’ dreams across the globe, has left him thinking holistically about his filmography. “I want to say bye on a high note,” he says. Then there’s the looming fact of Cage’s 60th birthday in January. “I was taking stock of how much time I had left. I thought, Okay, my dad died at 75, I’m going to be turning 60. If I’m lucky, I have maybe a good 15 years and hopefully more. What do I want to do with those 15 years, using my father as the model? It occurred very clearly to me that I want to spend time with my family.” (Cage’s youngest daughter, August Francesca, was born last year.)

This does not mean Cage is done with acting; he’s slowing down, and hoping to chart new territory. In our interview, he speaks of “not getting stuck,” and calls his goal as an actor “wanting to explore the edge of screen performance.” He indicates an intention to “switch formats,” with a particular interest in television—which he says he’s never done, aside from a pilot he filmed at 15 years old. He cites Bryan Cranston’s turn in Breaking Bad as an example of the challenge and thrill of episodic acting, developing a character over years. “Maybe it’s time to look at the immersive streaming experience,” he says. “I don’t know. I have to look for the next step and I haven’t found it yet.”

Dream Scenario cast Cage for a reason—several, really. An extreme version of the actor lives in the collective imagination, and his time in the spotlight over four decades has met high highs and low lows. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli gives Cage the room to reexamine that experience in subtle shades, ranging from deadpan to desperate to deeply sad. Growing up a big fan of Cage’s more ambitious work, like Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, meant Borgli saw his eventual star’s capability beyond where the internet—and a few less-than-spectacular VOD titles—had seemed to situate him. “I don’t think that’s as easy to get with the older guards, so to speak—they’ve already made up their minds about me,” Cage says. “But the younger generation that perhaps saw some movies at a very impressionable age—it’s the way I would feel about Fellini or some of the actors on television that I admired, like [Charles] Bronson.”

Both on our panel and in our subsequent interview, Cage conveys a deep gratitude for his union’s fight, as he continues to campaign on the other side of the SAG-AFTRA strike. Before an agreement with the AMPTP studios was reached, Dream Scenario had already secured an interim agreement—which means Cage has been on the road with the movie since the beginning, when it premiered to acclaim in Toronto. “They’re an actor-friendly house—they seem to have their eyes on original material that other studios don’t want to roll the dice on,” Cage says of A24. But he’s made a lot of big-studio movies in his day, and again, the question of legacy comes up as he considers his industry’s transformation.

“I’m thinking a lot about what happens to my likeness when I pass on,” he says, again noting his distaste for his recent altered performance in The Flash. “I don’t want, for example, Peter Loew or Frank Pierce or Cameron Poe or any of these characters that I’ve created to be put into a computer that decides what to do with them. I am very concerned about how they would use my likeness.”

Especially since Cage admits that he, like any actor, hasn’t been happy with the way a few of his movies have turned out. “I’ve had that quite a few times,” he says. “I don’t want to mention names, but you can’t avoid it if you’ve been doing it as long as I’ve been doing it. It’s going to happen.” There are other titles, though, that he hopes get reappraised as he transitions out of making films. “[2008’s] Bangkok Dangerous got really crushed by the critics, but I saw [David Fincher’s] The Killer recently, which was a very well-crafted movie and everybody was very good in it, and it was also about an assassin,” he says. “But I thought that Bangkok Dangerous really went for the heart of the character. It wasn’t as nihilistic. I think that movie could perhaps stand a few more viewings in light of The Killer.”

And that’s about as far as Cage would like to look back right now, even as he prepares to put a bow on an extraordinary life on the big screen. “I do want to get much more severe and stringent in my selection process,” he says, thinking about his final few films. “But I want to look ahead. I want to see what’s next.”