Nicolas Cage does not want you to see him singing in the purple rain.
As part of The Hollywood Reporter's annual Actor Roundtable, the National Treasure actor admitted that he's hung up the mic for good after a video of him singing one of Prince's iconic hits surfaced online in April 2019.
"For me, karaoke was like therapy until someone videotaped my punk-rock version of Prince's ‘Purple Rain' and it went everywhere," he told fellow panelists Jonathan Majors, Andrew Garfield, Peter Dinklage and Simon Rex, "and I said, 'I'm not going to karaoke anymore.'"
Garfield immediately encouraged Cage to grab the microphone once again. "Don't steal the gift from the world," he said. "You need to keep giving."
But Cage didn't appear too convinced. "Karaoke's supposed to be private," he explained. "It's like a prayer."
"Nic is just using this platform to get out his gripes," Garfield teased.
With their quick humor, the actors came together to try to solve the mystery behind the person who leaked Cage's now-viral performance, ultimately settling on an unusual perpetrator: Rain Man, a horse that Cage rode while filming Butcher's Crossing that he said "wanted to kill me."
"Rain Man was behind the leak," Cage joked, even though the footage was originally taken back in 2019 and he just recently finished filming the upcoming western.
"I'm so glad I got through that movie alive," he added. "Rain Man kept trying to knock me off and would try to run my head into roofs, and then I'd get off and try to be nice to him, and he would headbutt me. It was not fun."
Speaking with the New York Times in August 2019, Cage revealed that his legendary performance was "around the anniversary of Prince's passing" and that he wasn't aware he was being filmed.
"You go to a karaoke bar with a male friend in the neighborhood, the bar says ‘no videotaping' and suddenly, there's two different videos of you doing karaoke," he said. "Who did that? Who exposed the videotape? Who sold it?"
He also described his performance as more "primal-scream therapy" than singing, adding, "I went to the one place in my neighborhood that I knew had no video recording, just to have some fun, and that became everybody's business."