Nicolas Cage Opens Up About Playing Two Nicolas Cages, Reenacting Old Scenes for New Film
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Nicolas Cage turned in some of the best work of his career playing a double role in Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation,” and he’s set to try something similar in his upcoming project “The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent.” The meta drama from writer-director Tom Gormican casts Nicolas Cage as two fictionalized versions of himself. The first is a downtrodden actor struggling to return to his glory days. The second is a younger doppelgänger of the actor from when he was a big star who haunts his older self for throwing his career away. The two get in way over their heads after the strapped-for-cash older actor accepts a $1 million gig to attend the birthday of a Mexican billionaire super-fan.
“It’s a stylised version of me, and the fact I even have to refer to myself in the third person makes me extremely uncomfortable,” Cage recently told Empire magazine in one of his first interviews about the upcoming project. “There are many scenes in the movie where modern or contemporary – here we go – ‘Nic Cage’ and then young ‘Nic Cage’ are colliding and arguing and battling it out. It’s an acrobatic approach to acting.”
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Cage went on to say the movie “is definitely just me ‘taking the piss,’ as they say, out of myself.” While the characters Cage is playing in the film may be fictionalized versions of himself, it appears the script from Gormican and Kevin Etten will pull from Cage’s real filmography. The actor says the film is forcing him to look back at some of his previous action gigs because the script requires him to reenact certain scenes from his real movies.
“I don’t like to look back,” Cage said. “But this movie kind of pushes it all back in my face. I’m probably going to have to look at a couple of the movies from the past again, because I think we’re gonna have to reenact some of those sequences. It’s like walking through a ‘Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari’ version of ‘Con Air’ and ‘Face/Off.'”
Lionsgate has the U.S. distribution rights to “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and will release the film in theaters March 19, 2021.
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