After professionally acting for 40 years, Nicolas Cage has perhaps found his greatest and/or most challenging role: Nicolas Cage. The Raising Arizona and National Treasure star will play a fictional version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, but don’t expect this movie to go into Cage’s pile of movies starring himself that he’ll check out in their completed forms. In fact, the actor has already decided that he’ll never watch The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
While speaking about his latest movie, Prisoners of the Ghostland, with Collider, Nicolas Cage was asked about how he jumped from recent movies like Willy’s Wonderland and Pig (both of which are particularly weird entries in the Cage filmography) to playing himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Cage responded:
That is a really great question and I’m still trying to answer it. One of my answers is that I’m never going to see that movie. I’m told it’s a good movie. My manager, Mike Nilon, who is also a producer on it, looked at it. He was very happy. I’m told the audience loved the movie. But it’s just too much of a whacked-out trip for me to go to a movie theater and watch me play Tom Gormican’s highly-neurotic, anxiety-ridden version of me. Because he kept pushing me in that direction. I said 'Tom, that’s not really me. I’m really [made of] quiet, meditative, thoughtful moments. I’m not this neurotic, high-strung, anxiety-ridden guy all the time.' But he said, 'well, neurotic Cage is the best Cage.' I said, 'okay, okay. Let’s go, man. I’ll do what you want.' I won’t see it. But I do hope you enjoy it.
So if The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has a big world premiere, it sounds like we shouldn’t expect to see Nicolas Cage watching the movie after the red carpet festivities, assuming he shows up to the event at all. From Cage’s perspective, it’s too weird for him to watch play an exaggerated caricature who, while also named Nicolas Cage, simply doesn’t resemble his real-life self. This reminds me of that time Cage appeared on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update and called Andy Samberg’s impression of him “an exaggerated, screaming psychopath who really just doesn’t exist.”
His unwillingness to actually watch himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent aside, it sounds like Nicolas Cage had an enjoyable enough time making the movie under the direction of Tom Gormican, who previously helmed 2014’s That Awkward Moment. As for what we can expect from this fictional version of Cage, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent follows him at a point in his career where he’s struggling, to the point that he accepts $1 million to perform at the birthday party of one of his fans, who’s named Javi. But as it turns out, the super-rich Javi, played by The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal, also happens to be a powerful drug lord, and Cage is subsequently approached by U.S. federal agents to help them bring down Javi’s operation. The increasingly-crazy situation becomes even more personal for the actor when his wife and daughter are taken captive.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent opens in theaters on April 22, 2022, and its cast also includes Tiffany Haddish, Neil Patrick Harris, Sharon Horgan, Lily Sheen, Jacob Scipio and Paco León. If you’re curious about what other movies are coming out next year, scan through our 2022 release schedule.
