Daniel Day-Lewis and Christian Bale were considered to play the role of Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the film’s producers revealed.
Cage plays a fictional version of himself in the new meta-comedy, which also stars Pedro Pascal as his billionaire superfan.
The film’s writers Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten said that their script’s success hinged on securing Cage as their star.
“The funny part about that was we have a bunch of studios interested in the script,” Gornican told The Hollywood Reporter. “But there’s an asterisk on all of this, meaning, if he doesn’t want to do it, your sale goes away. Like, ‘by the way, we don’t want this f***ing thing if he’s not in it.’
“There is no other version of it. When he was reading the script it was like this sort of double anxiety. It’s not like if he doesn’t do it, we’ll offer it to somebody else. It was gone.”
However, the pair did think of contingency plans should Cage have decided against the movie, as they’d heard beforehand that the actor had “done these projects before and he’s not wild about Nick as Nick”.
“The only actually good idea – I don’t know whose it was – was to have either Christian Bale or Daniel Day-Lewis playing Nick Cage,” Etten said. “Nobody else who really has a mixture of the super high talent he has and the goodwill of people wanting him to succeed.”
In her four-star review for the movie, Clarisse Loughrey wrote for The Independent: “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a film made explicitly for people like me. People who aren’t just Nicolas Cage fans, but whose adoration of the actor comes packaged inside a kind of cultish fervour.”
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is in cinemas now.
