Taking a break between shooting scenes for the new film at Universal Studios — one of the few Hollywood locations with a sound stage large enough to accommodate Book of Secret’s impressively gargantuan sets — Cage spoke about returning for a second go-round as ‘Ben Gates’ and explained why he tries to keep audiences and critics guessing…

Was making a sequel to the first National Treasure an easy sell for you?

I didn’t have any expectations for the first film and I was somewhat surprised, happily surprised, that it caught on the way it did and, yeah, I was very pleased to have a chance to play such a positive character again.

How so?

I always try to find a way to play characters that are somehow synchronised with my own life and whatever I may or may not be going through so I can play them honestly.

In the first film ‘Ben Gates’ had to steal one of America’s great historical treasures. How different and interesting is this sequel?

Yeah, on the first one the bar was, how do we steal the Declaration of Independence? What they wanted to do on this one was to top that somehow. The concept in Book of Secrets is basically, how do you kidnap the President of the United States? We have upped the ante with the historical concept of this one because the story revolves around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and some missing pages from the diary of John Wilkes Booth (President Lincoln’s assassin]).

Those missing pages are a historical fact and there is still a lot of speculation about that fateful night that Lincoln was shot at the theatre and who was involved and what they might have been looking for. So it makes for a wonderful and exciting and really interesting tale. There’s a nice, complicated weave to the story.

How do you feel about having Helen Mirren play your mother?

I first saw her in a movie called Excalibur years ago and I loved her in that. And I could see where she could be my mother because we have a similar aquiline nose and long face.

I remember with Jon Voight on the first film, I said, ‘Look I don’t care who you cast to play my father as long as he’s the greatest actor in the world. When Jon’s on, there is no one any better. And the same for my mother. I said, ‘I don’t care who you cast as long as she’s the greatest actress in the world’. And the same thing with Helen: when she’s on, there is no one any better.

Has she surprised you in any way?

I think I have an ability to guess what people are like from photographs and when I met her, she was just what I hoped she would be. She’s very down to earth, very easy to talk to, very friendly, and has a shocking sense of humour at times, which is arresting and fun (laughs). I guess it’s a way of breaking the ice. She’s a force to be reckoned with, a big deal, and you could easily be intimidated by someone of that calibre, and yet within a second she puts you at your ease.

Between Helen Mirren, Jon Voight, Ed Harris and Harvey Keitel, you have a pretty talented ensemble on this film.

Do you ever worry they will steal all your scenes?

(Laughs) The more you encourage someone to be great in a movie the better that movie will be, however it happens.

It’s one of the more obnoxious things about film actors when they get competitive and start to worry about being upstaged and who’s going to look at them, who gets the last word. To me that’s when acting becomes kind of adolescent and makes me not want to be an actor, so I try to do everything I can to not be that way.