Nicolas Cage recalls ‘dark’ time being $6 million in debt

Nicolas Cage has recalled the “dark” time he had to accept “crummy” film roles to be able to get himself out of being $6 million in debt.

Appearing on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday, the Oscar winner recalled his financial struggles after the real estate market crashed, saying he signed up for any role he could just to be able to pay the money back.

“I was over-invested in real estate,” he confessed. “The real estate market crashed, and I couldn’t get out in time.”

“I paid them all back, but it was about $6 million. I never filed for bankruptcy,” the 59-year-old “Moonstruck” actor added.

Host Sharyn Alfonsi chimed in, “That had to be a dark period for you.”

“It was dark, sure,” Cage responded, noting that booking acting roles “no doubt” helped him out.

“Work was always my guardian angel. It may not have been blue chip, but it was still work,” he added.

Cage added that to get over his financial dark hole at the time, he would accept a string of direct-to-video movies.

“Even if the movie ultimately is crummy, they know I’m not phoning it in, that I care every time,” he said.

In an interview with GQ last year, the “Face/Off” actor admitted that some of the films simply “didn’t work.”

“When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all,” he told the publication in March 2022. “They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like ‘Mandy,’ but some of them didn’t work.”

Speaking to The New York Times Magazine in 2019, Cage admitted that the paycheck is what ultimately made him sign on the dotted line at the time.

“I can’t go into specifics or percentages or ratios, but yeah, money is a factor,” he told the outlet. I’m going to be completely direct about that. There’s no reason not to be.”

“There are times when it’s more of a factor than not,” he continued. “I still have to feel that, whether or not the movie around me entirely works, I’ll be able to deliver something and be fun to watch.”

“But yes, it’s no secret that mistakes have been made in my past that I’ve had to try to correct,” he added.

“Financial mistakes happened with the real estate implosion that occurred, in which the lion’s share of everything I had earned was pretty much eradicated. But one thing I wasn’t going to do was file for bankruptcy.”