Nicolas Cage says he took 'crummy' movie roles to pay off $6 million debt after he 'over-invested in real estate' and bought several castles and an island

• Nicolas Cage said he took "crummy" roles after he "over-invested in real estate" and lost money.

• "It wasn't because I spent $80 on an octopus," he said of his $6 million debt on "60 Minutes."

• The actor once owned castles in Germany and England, as well as a mansion in New Orleans.

Nicolas Cage has said he took "crummy" movie roles to pay off $6 million in debt after he "overinvested in real estate" before the market crashed in the late 2000s.

Speaking on CBS' "60 Minutes," the Academy Award-winning actor spoke about how he got himself in — and then out of — millions of dollars of debt over the last decade.

The "Renfield" star said that it was properties, which include castles in Germany and England, as well as a mansion in New Orleans and a private island in the Bahamas, not eccentric purchases such as dinosaur skulls and a pet octopus, that racked up his hefty debts.

"I was overinvested in real estate. It wasn't because I spent $80 on an octopus. The real-estate market crashed, and I couldn't get out in time," he said.

"I paid them all back, but it was about $6 million. I never filed for bankruptcy."

"That had to be a dark period for you," CBS' Sharyn Alfonsi said.

"It was dark, sure," the "Moonstruck" actor responded, adding that "work was always my guardian angel" and taking on three to four movies a year helped him get through the period and pay off the debts.

Speaking on the movies he made during that time, many of which were released direct-to-video, he said: "Even if the movie ultimately is crummy, they know I'm not phoning it in, that I care every time."

"But there are those folks that are probably thinking that the only good acting that I can do is the acting that I chose to do by design, which was more operatic and, you know, larger-than-life and so-called 'Cage rage,' and all that. But you're not going to get that every time. "

The "Leaving Las Vegas" actor previously told The New York Times in 2019 that money was a motivator in the projects he was choosing.

"I can't go into specifics or percentages or ratios, but yeah, money is a factor. I'm going to be completely direct about that. There's no reason not to be," Cage said.

"It's no secret that mistakes have been made in my past that I've had to try to correct. Financial mistakes happened with the real-estate implosion that occurred, in which the lion's share of everything I had earned was pretty much eradicated. But one thing I wasn't going to do was file for bankruptcy."

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