'The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent' Will Recreate Scenes From Nicolas Cage Movies

Nicolas Cage is about to take on the ultimate Nicolas Cage role: Nicolas Cage. Cage is playing a fictionalized version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which finds the actor reckoning with his career choices while also getting mixed up in a plot involving the CIA and a drug cartel kingpin. Playing Nic Cage will require Nic Cage to revisit some Nic Cage movies, a concept that the actor isn't entirely comfortable with. But he'll do it anyway, because he's an artist, gosh darn it. In a new interview, Cage opens up a little about what it's going to be like to play himself.

In an interview with Empire, Nicolas Cage talked a bit about playing himself in the upcoming Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. "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," said Cage. "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."

Cage compared the "young Nic Cage" persona he's playing to an appearance he once made on the British TV show Wogan back in the 1990s. I've actually never seen this before, and if you haven't either, please watch it below. You're in for a ride.

In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage plays a version of himself "under a mountain of debt" and "dealing with a strained relationship with his teenage daughter. He also occasionally talks to an egotistical 1990s version of himself who rides him for making too many crappy movies and for not being a star anymore." Cage's debts force him to "make an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire who happens to be a fan of Cage's work and secretly hopes to show him a script on which he's been working."

However, "Cage is informed by the CIA that the billionaire is actually a drug cartel kingpin who has kidnapped the daughter of a Mexican presidential nominee, and is recruited by the U.S. government to get intelligence. The situation spirals even more dramatically when the Mexican brings over Cage's daughter and his ex-wife for a reconciliation, and when their lives are on the line, Cage takes on the role of a lifetime."

According to reports, the script references Cage films like Leaving Las Vegas, Face-Off, and Gone in 60 Seconds, and that means the real Cage is going to have to revisit some of his older work, which he's not entirely comfortable with. "I don't like to look back," he 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."

I don't want to over-hype things, but this all sounds amazing and I want to see it immediately. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is expected to open in 2021.