In a recent interview with Empire, Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas, Mandy) has finally opened up about his involvement in Lionsgate’s highly-anticipated film The Unbearable Weight of a Massive Talent, where Cage is set to portray two fictionalized versions of himself: a present-day version and a younger one. He further revealed that the upcoming meta film will be featuring reenactments of scenes from some of his iconic movies such as 1997’s Con Air and Face/Off.
“It’s a stylized version of me, and the fact I even have to refer to myself in the third person makes me extremely uncomfortable,” Cage said. “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.”
He added, “I don’t like to look back. 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.’”
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The Unbearable Weight of a Massive Talent will see Nicolas Cage portray a version of himself desperate to get a role in a new Tarantino movie while also struggling with a strained relationship with his teenage daughter. As he makes his way through life, he also talks to an egotistical version of himself from the ’90s who railroads him for making bad movies and not being the same star he was at the time, now dealing with a mountain of death and making an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire that is a huge fan.
While bonding with the man, who hopes to show Cage a script he’s been working on, the actor learns from the CIA that the billionaire is actually a drug cartel kingpin who has kidnapped the daughter of a presidential nominee and is recruited to get intelligence. The predicament gets worse when the billionaire brings Cage’s daughter and ex-wife for a reconciliation and he must take on the role of a lifetime to save their lives.
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The Unbearable Weight of a Massive Talent will be directed by Tom Gormican (G), who co-wrote the script with Kevin Etten. The film will executive produced by Etten and Kevin Turren along with Cage and Mike Nilon through their Saturn Films banner.
The script is set to include nods to various Cage works including Leaving Las Vegas, Face-Off and Gone in 60 Seconds and reportedly has tones of Adaptation, which Cage starred in, as well as Jean-Claude Van Damme’s JCVD and the Hollywood caper Get Shorty.
The film will hit the theaters on March 19, 2021.
