Nicolas Cage doesn’t seem to turn down any role these days. From Left Behind to Season of the Witch, Cage hasn’t made the best role choices in the previous five years. However, there was a time when Cage was a bit more picky, and he turned down a job that may have been one of his career’s most important.

Nicolas Cage sat down with Newsweek to discuss his new horror thriller Pay the Ghost, as well as his long film résumé, which includes a few films he’s turned down. What stands out the most? Aragorn in Lord of the Rings and Neo in The Matrix.

Nicolas Cage has had a difficult time picking assignments in recent years. He’s been in a string of flops, with many of them going directly to VOD or home video (which isn’t always a negative thing in this day and age of streaming media, but it has been in his case). He got a lot of praise for his indie movie Joe, and he had a terrific cameo in Kick-Ass, but he hasn’t done anything noteworthy in a long time. He isn’t being picky at this point in his career. However, when he was at the pinnacle of his game in the late 1990s, he thought he could afford to pass on 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.

“There certainly were movies that I probably would have benefited from if circumstances in my life allowed me to make them,” he remarked, adding that he doesn’t live with regret. “There were different things going on in my life at the time that precluded me from being able to travel and be away from home for three years,” Cage remarked of being given the part of Aragon.

He doesn’t say what those things are, but his family was most likely a factor in his decision to go to New Zealand for three years to shoot the films back-to-back. Cage, on the other hand, sees his choice to decline the job as a positive:

“But the thing is about those movies, I can watch them. I can enjoy them as an audience member. I don’t really watch my own movies. And so I genuinely do have the joy of watching these—especially with Lord of the Rings.”

Nicolas Cage is a great comic book and fantasy aficionado, therefore these are unsurprisingly some of his favorite films. Nicolas Cage in the character of Aragorn would have been strange, although he does have similar parts in Season of the Witch and Outcast. Many fans are undoubtedly relieved he didn’t take the job after seeing those films. He doesn’t dwell on the missed opportunity.

“I don’t really have any regrets. I think regret is a waste of time. I try to always move forward as opposed to dwelling on the past or the movies that might have happened. There certainly were movies that I probably would have benefited from if circumstances in my life allowed me to make them.”

But, alas, his life didn’t permit it, so we’ll have to imagine what it would have been like to hear Cage say, “Let’s hunt some Orc.” Perhaps someone will get him to recite a few lines from the film at his next interview.