Nicolas Cage has appeared in a pair of movies released within the last two months, and they couldn’t be more different from each other on almost every conceivable level.
In quiet drama Pig, the actor delivers what many are calling one of his best-ever performances as a mysterious loner on the hunt for his missing truffle-hunter. On the other side of the coin, today brings Prisoners of the Ghostland, which most definitely lives up to the hype calling it the craziest effort of Cage’s career.
Or at least, the craziest for now. April 2022 heralds the arrival of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the self-aware action comedy where the Academy Award winner plays fallen star Nicolas Cage, reduced to taking million-dollar paychecks for showing up at birthday parties and re-enacting scenes from his back catalogue.
It sounds nuts, and the reactions to the trailer screened at CinemaCon promised another wild adventure for Hollywood’s favorite maverick. In a new interview with Collider, though, Cage revealed that he’s got no intention of watching the finished product.
“That is a really great question and I’m still trying to answer it. One of my answers is that I’m never going to see that movie. I’m told it’s a good movie. My manager, Mike Nilon, who is also a producer on it, looked at it. He was very happy. I’m told the audience loved the movie. But it’s just too much of a whacked-out trip for me to go to a movie theater and watch me play Tom Gormican’s highly-neurotic, anxiety-ridden version of me. Because he kept pushing me in that direction. I said ‘Tom, that’s not really me. I’m really made of quiet, meditative, thoughtful moments. I’m not this neurotic, high-strung, anxiety-ridden guy all the time’. But he said, ‘Well, neurotic Cage is the best Cage’. I said, ‘Okay, okay. Let’s go, man. I’ll do what you want’. I won’t see it. But I do hope you enjoy it.”
Nicolas Cage refusing to see a movie where he plays a semi-fictionalized version Nicolas Cage drawn into a conspiracy involving drug cartels, the CIA and his kidnapped wife and child is completely understandable, even if his legion of fans will be right there on opening day to see what unbridled insanity The Unbearable Weight of Talent has in store.
