Nicolas Cage turned down The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent four times: ‘I wanted no part of it’

‘They were [initially] talking more about like having the character be like Cameron Poe from Con Air, but that’s not me,’ actor says

Nicolas Cage has revealed that he turned down a role in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent three or four times.

The 58-year-old actor said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that he wanted “no part of” the new film which starred him as a fictionalised version of himself.

“I turned it down three or four times,” Cage told the outlet. “I wanted no part of it.”

However, when Cage got a letter from Gormican, he thought: “OK, he’s not just trying to mock so-called Nick Cage; there is a real interest in some of the earlier work”.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is based on the premise that Cage begrudgingly accepts a $1m (£764,895) offer to attend the birthday of a billionaire super fan.

When things take a wild turn, Cage is forced to become a version of some of his most iconic and beloved characters in order to extricate his wife and daughter from the fan who is a notorious drug lord.

(Getty Images)

“What really put the hook in me was a sequence that is no longer in the movie,” Cage said.

“It was a sequence where the Nick Cage character goes into a series of vignettes that are all stylised in the German expressionism of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.”

He added: “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.”

Cage admitted that he also really “responded” to the character, a younger version of himself.

“They were [initially] talking more about like having the character be like Cameron Poe from Con Air – but that’s not me,” he said. “Look at my appearance on the Wogan show in England when I was promoting Wild at Heart. That guy was an obnoxious, irreverent, arrogant madman. 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 is scheduled to premiere at the South by Southwest film festival on 12 March, followed by a wide release in the US on 22 April.