Nicolas Cage’s esoteric dreams of sentient shrimp-people: “I drew it to show you”
Long before Nicolas Cage starred in the hilarious black comedy Dream Scenario, his nightly reveries were already a source of interest for the eccentric star. After all, when he made The Sorcerer’s Apprentice with Jay Baruchel in 2011, he once told the bemused young comedy star of a particularly bizarre, esoteric dream he’d had the night before. It was about a sentient shrimp man – and Cage drew a picture of it so Baruchel could envision his nightmarish visage.
The Longlegs star has become such a legendarily weird figure in Hollywood that every time he appears on a talk show, he’ll inevitably be asked for one of his patented “crazy Nic Cage” stories. Maybe you want to know about the time Dog the Bounty Hunter bailed him out of jail. Perhaps you want to hear about when he was stalked by a mime or took mushrooms with his cat. Many great Cage stories are out there, and he’s usually pretty happy to tell them.
This applies to his co-stars, too—especially if they’re appearing on one of Conan O’Brien’s shows. O’Brien has an enduring fascination with Cage and is always keen to hear what people who have worked with the kooky star think of his peculiarities. In 2019, Baruchel sat down with the hilarious talk show host, and talk quickly turned to his time with Cage on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Baruchel immediately started to giggle, clearly aware of the kind of bizarre tale O’Brien was after. He acknowledged, “He’s a very specific person,” and chuckled: “He’s an incredibly bespoke individual. They broke the mould. He’s deeply humble, very hard worker, very polite, but yeah, he’s his own guy. Every morning, who knows what hilarious encounters it would bring.”
Luckily, Baruchel could then regale O’Brien with just the kind of tale he wanted to hear. He began recounting a strange morning when he asked Cage how his previous evening had gone, expecting to hear an off-hand, “Oh, it was fine” or “I didn’t sleep well”. Instead, Cage immediately launched into a description of a dream so vivid and unusual that it’s a wonder Baruchel was able to keep a straight face.
Adopting a pitch-perfect Cage impression, Baruchel claimed he said, “I had this dream. There was a shrimp man. He had a human body and a shrimp head.” What was the shrimp man doing in this dream, we hear you ask? Well, according to the dreamer himself, the humanoid shrimp creature simply pointed at him and aggressively said, “Shrimp, you fuck! Shrimp, you fuck!”
Was the shrimp man accusing Cage of something? Was he intimating that Cage is, in fact, a shrimp and not a tall, raven-haired Hollywood icon? Or, most perplexingly, were his words an instruction to the sleeping Cage? As in, he needed to “shrimp” – whatever that means? In the end, there were more questions than answers.
Amazingly, though, Baruchel’s surreal shrimp misadventure didn’t end there. Instead, Cage fixed him with those piercing eyes, stared directly into his very soul, and said, “I drew it to show you.”
20 minutes later, Cage’s assistant scurried over to Baruchel with a piece of paper and said, “Mr Cage wanted you to see this.” Baruchel looked down, and there it was – a drawing of a man with a shrimp head and a human body, his extended finger hauntingly pointed straight ahead.
Naturally, this crazy crustacean chronicle tickled O’Brien greatly, and he guffawed, “That confirms everything I hoped would be true about Nic Cage! That’s fantastic”. For his part, a chortling Baruchel agreed, “There’s only one. There’s definitely only one.”
