Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet movie is not exactly a great movie, but it could have been real weird. Like, Nicolas Cage-weird. In a hilarious and wide-ranging interview with Vulture, Rogen spoke about the Sony hack, his comedy special, and how the studio almost cast that guy from National Treasure in his superhero movie.

With a movie as expensive as Green Hornet, Rogen explained, the studio has a lot of power over who you cast, and at one point Sony wanted Cage to be in it. The only problem was that Cage really wanted to put on a… questionable accent. Here’s the portion of the interview where Rogen explains the idea:

Basically, when you’re making a movie that expensive the studio has a real say in who you cast. So the studio was like, “You gotta make the villain a star. We want you to cast Nicolas Cage.” So we thought, let’s talk to him. And we do, and he tells us that he wants to do the movie, but he wants to play the character as, like, a white Bahamian or Jamaican. Which to us was a little worrisome.

Oy.
Yeah, not that there aren’t white Bahamians, but it seemed perhaps insensitive. So then we were going to have a big dinner with Nicolas Cage at Amy Pascal’s house to talk about the movie. And I remember driving to the dinner with Evan and saying, “If he does the white Bahamian thing at the dinner, I’m going to lose it.” [Laughs.] I was like, “I can’t deal with being face-to-face with Nicolas Cage as he’s doing a Bahamian accent.”

So what happened?
Within 20 minutes of getting to the dinner he’s fully doing it.

When it comes to whether the accent was any good, Rogen revealed it surprisingly was, but Cage caught on pretty quickly that people weren’t exactly on board with it. So he just got up and left in the middle of the dinner, as any non-normal human would. Rogen added that Cage called him two days later and said, “I’m getting the sense that you don’t want me in this movie.”

Maybe Cage could have made the movie a little more money than it made in theaters, but I do think it’s hysterical that he could tell immediately that Rogen wasn’t vibing with his idea. I would’ve loved to see Cage go Full Cage in that movie, but probably not in this particular way.

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