Nicolas Cage turned down The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 3 or 4 times before accepting

Since it was first announced that Nicolas Cage would be playing himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, we’ve absolutely been onboard with the idea, but it turns out that Cage needed some convincing.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is set to premiere at SXSW tomorrow and Nicolas Cage spoke with THR about the film. The comedy finds Cage playing a fictionalized version of himself who accepts a $1 million offer from a wealthy super fan (Pedro Pascal) to attend a party, only for that super fan to turn out to be a notorious drug lord. When writer/director Tom Gormican first approached Cage about starring in the film, the actor said that he “turned it down three or four times” until a sincere letter from Gormican ultimately convinced him.

I wanted no part of it. But when I got Tom’s letter, then I thought, “OK, he’s not just trying to mock so-called Nick Cage; there is a real interest in some of the earlier work.” His tone was more of a celebration of some of [the actor’s iconic onscreen] moments — like being at the bottom of the pool in Leaving Las Vegas or [using] the gold guns in Face/Off.

Nicolas Cage added that there was one sequence that really attracted him that’s no longer in the movie. “It was a sequence where the Nick Cage character goes into a series of vignettes that are all stylized in the German expressionism of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,” Cage said. “So there was a sequence in black and white that was a Gone in 60 Seconds race in a Mustang, there was the Leaving Las Vegas character in a hotel room. It was fun to make and cool to look at. Ultimately, the studio decided it was too far out for audiences.” In addition to playing himself, Cage also plays Nicky, an imaginary alter ego based on a ’90s version of Cage. Gormican initially wanted Nicky to be like Cameron Poe from Con Air, but Cage pointed to his appearance on the Wogan show in England when he was promoting Wild at Heart as the better choice. “That guy was an obnoxious, irreverent, arrogant madman,” Cage said. “That’s the young version of me that I think that I would be confronting as the contemporary Nick Cage.“

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent will hit theaters on April 22, 2022.