Nicolas Cage sat down with Vanity Fair to watch certain movies from his filmography, and one he arguably enjoyed the most was 2004’s National Treasure.


“How do you take something that is so profoundly ridiculous and really try to sell it?” Cage asked as he watched that (in)famous scene.

“What I really like about that scene just seeing it again for the first time in however many years is I like the positivity of the character. He really believes this. He really reveres it. I think that’s charming,” he continued.

While the Academy-Award-winning actor found that scene hilarious, but he seemed to have genuine love for it.

“I can’t even say it without laughing,” he said about the line.

Cage is also very aware of that scene going around social media.

“It has been meme’d so many times. It has been ‘SNL’d,'” he elaborated on the scene’s long-lasting effect.

Nicolas Cage, SNL’d

Just a side note on that SNL moment: Cage made a surprise on the Weekend Update segment called In the Cage with Andy Samberg who was impersonating Nicolas Cage.

Is that a little confusing? Host Seth Meyer thought so too. Samberg (as Cage, sitting next to Cage) said, “As everyone knows, my dream as an actor is to appear in every film ever released.”

Props to Cage (the real one) for being so “calm and stealthy like a ninja warrior” the entire time — even in the face (literally) of someone mocking his career choices. Especially if that someone is “an exaggerated, screaming psychopath who really just doesn’t exist.”

But “that’s high praise!”

Enough walking down memory lane. However, it’s also hilarious to know that the actor is very self-aware of how unintentionally iconic that scene is.

“But you can’t help but laugh! I think what makes it work is how serious Justin [Bartha] and I are taking it,” he said, shouting his co-star who played his colleague in the movie.

“If you play it for laughs, then it’s screwball comedy and it’s stupid and it’s not my thing. That’s not where I’m at. The fact that we’d played it as dramatic actors makes it even more funny than it might’ve been if it was slapstick,” Cage explained.

He also praised the film’s director, “I think Jon Turteltaub shot it lovingly. He made the characters look like they had great reverence and regard [for it] … like a holy object.”

And Cage appreciated the comic timing of the scene as well, “But to punch it with ‘I’m going to steal it’ is so ridiculous you just can’t help but love it. It’s nice to see that scene again.”

National Treasure was a box office hit in 2004, grossing $347.5 million worldwide. In the movie, Cage played American historian, cryptographer and treasure hunter Benjamin Gates Franklin.

He and his colleague, computer expert Riley Poole (Bartha) are eventually joined by archivist Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger). The three search for what is said to be an enormous, but maybe mythical lost Freemason treasure. The map to that treasure is hidden on the back of… guess what? The Declaration of Independence.

The film spawned a sequel released in 2007, National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The main cast returned with the addition of Dame Helen Mirren as Emily Appleton-Gates, Ben’s mother.

A third film has been talked about, but it hasn’t gone into development. Disney+ did have a series National Treasure: Edge of History that was launched in December 2022, but was canceled.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer told E! Online during the show’s premiere that “we were developing [another] National Treasure for the theaters with Nicolas Cage — which we still are. So that’s ongoing.” However, no official word on that yet.