With a career that includes a variety of over-the-top roles, castle-buying sprees and odd-movie choices, Nicolas Cage has become the source of constant pop-culture fodder. He’s inspired Internet memes, weird merchandise and even a tongue-in-cheek video service named in his honor. But as it turns out, the actor has been in on the joke all along. In this surprisingly down-to-earth interview with The Guardian, Cage dispels some misinformation like, “a misconception about me is that I just do movies for pay checks,” false perceptions about his acting (“I can only do exaggerated characters. Or what they would call over-the-top performances”) and explains that for kitschy films like The Wicker Man, there’s a tendency for “folks in the media to think that we’re not in on the joke.” Cage also has relatively reasonable explanations for crazy news stories, like the foreclosure on his Bavarian castle: “I was a big believer in real estate, and I got caught up in that bubble that exploded.” See, as it turns out, Nicolas Cage is just like us …