Nicolas Cage Was Apparently Never Paid For The Film That Won Him An Oscar

Nicolas Cage could’ve used that money for another shrunken head.

Writer-director Mike Figgis told The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast during its most recent episode that he and the actor didn’t get any money for their work on 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas.

“Nicolas and I never got paid,” Mike said, while discussing the film that won Nicolas an Academy Award for Best Actor, his only Oscar to date. (Listen to Mike’s remarks below, starting at about 31:57.)

“They said the film never went into profit,” Mike said of Lumiere Pictures, which financed Leaving Las Vegas for about $4 million, according to the director.

The film earned $32 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. 

The filmmaker shot the film on handheld 16 mm cameras on the streets of Las Vegas, and said in his interview that “no one” wanted to finance the anti-Hollywood picture.

Leaving Las Vegas, which Mike adapted from the 1990 John O’Brien novel of the same name, follows Ben Sanderson (Cage), a disillusioned Los Angeles screenwriter who moves to Las Vegas to engage in extremely self-destructive behaviour. Mike said Nicolas was supposed to make $100,000 for his role in the film.

Although Mike said he and Nicolas made a whopping $0 for the film, he didn’t express any kind of resentment.

“Whatever,” he told THR. “My career then took off again, and the next film I did, I got really well paid ... And within a year [Cage] was earning 20 million a film, so that was quite good.”

Leaving Las Vegas was a turning point in Nicolas’ career. He followed up his Oscar-winning role in huge projects like The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off.

The actor soon became one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, but by 2009 he’d seemingly squandered his fortune on expensive and infamously eccentric purchases — which reportedly included three castles, two islands in the Bahamas, two yachts, a Gulfstream jet, 50 cars, various shrunken heads, a pet octopusand a $276,000 dinosaur skull that he outbid Leonardo DiCaprio to obtain.

He eventually owed the IRS about $14 million, and millions more to other creditors, according to a March profile in GQ.

In the years that followed, Nicolas starred in 46 movies, an experience he described to GQ as “a conveyor belt.”

Although this was a low point for the actor, his career has taken an upswing in recent years with roles in 2018’s Mandy and 2021’s Pig.

In this year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the actor poked fun at his own financial troubles by playing a fictionalised version of himself who accepts a $1 million offer to attend a wealthy fan’s birthday party.