Nicolas Cage is coming to terms with his own memefication.
In fact, he’s very self-aware — even philosophical — about being the subject of so many memes. It was a concept that initially made him hesitate to play himself in Tom Gormican’s new Lionsgate feature The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, but one thing about Cage that has always been true is that the man loves a challenge.
“The most challenging part was trying to protect myself,” he says. “I knew that this was a kind of a stylized interpretation of so-called Nick Cage, and a lot of it was coming out of the memefication of so-called Nick Cage and the cyber aura that people have created. I didn’t create it. They created it, and that’s fine.”
In the past, Cage has expressed frustration that his memedom might distract from the movies into which he and his collaborators have poured their sweat and tears. As Kermit the Frog may have said if he were in a similar situation, it’s not easy being a meme. But Cage is starting to come around.
“I had to play with it and become self-aware about it and try to work with what had happened to me in terms of the internet,” Cage says. “There are other actors who are far more famous than I am who I don’t think have had to look so closely at memefication as I have. And so, I had to do something with it. And I think this movie gave me an opportunity to play with that.”
We’re speaking over the phone, so I can’t see him, but he’s full of good-natured laughter, sharp explanations, and esoteric descriptions of film genres that are over my head, like Nouveau Shamanism and Western Kabuki. I imagine he’s leaning on a velvet chaise by a sun-lit window, wearing a drapey shirt with a jewel-toned print, gazing out across the Los Angeles skyline.
Either that or a silk bathrobe. Or a black leather jacket. With flames.
Nicolas Cage and director Tom Gormican on the set of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Photo by Katalin Vermes / Lionsgate
How It Started
It wasn’t a slam-dunk for director and co-writer Tom Gormican to get a yes out of Cage.
“I must have turned it down two or three times,” Cage says. “I didn’t want to play myself in a movie, I wanted them to look for someone else to portray me. But Tom was very hell-bent on making sure I played the part, and he wrote me a very thoughtful letter,” Cage continues. “It became clear to me when I read the letter that he wasn’t really trying to mock the Nicolas Cage character, but kind of trying to look at this evolution of the character in terms of family.”
Gormican, who previously directed 2014’s That Awkward Moment starring Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan, remembers meeting with Cage to discuss Massive Talent at the now-shuttered Pacific Dining Car in Downtown Los Angeles.
“He was there just in jeans and a T-shirt, like a normal guy. He was like, ‘Hey, thanks for coming down here. This is where Humphrey Bogart used to come after he didn’t get a role,’” Gormican says, doing his best impression of Cage’s voice.
Rather amazingly, Gormican and his writing partner, Kevin Etten — with whom he created the Fox series Ghosted — wrote the script for Massive Talent on spec, having never met Cage. They had no idea whether he would say yes to starring in the movie, or if it would ever get made. But after they shopped the script around to several studios, Gormican says, a bidding war broke out, Cage read the script, and soon they were sitting in the diner where Humphrey Bogart used to go to drink martinis and feel sad.
“We decided to take a year off and just write something that we wanted to see,” Gormican says. “There was a bit of a creative resurrection where we were just beaten up and getting run over… at the same time, I had this idea about Nicolas Cage, and I thought, maybe he’s going through the same thing. You have this unbelievably talented human being, an Oscar winner, who then cashes in any sort of capital he has in the industry to become a giant, unorthodox action movie star, who then does some of my favorite, most detailed, nuanced performances of all time, like Adaptation or Matchstick Men. I’m going, well, what happened to him?
“At the same time, I had an actor friend who was invited to go to a birthday party, and he was telling me, ‘This is it. This is the end. I guess I’m finished,’” Gormican adds. “I thought, let’s put Nick in that situation and see what happens.”
With that, the premise of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was born: Nicolas Cage, a wildly talented and somewhat eccentric movie star who has faced his fair share of challenges in recent years, takes an offer of one million dollars to attend the birthday party of a very wealthy man of mysterious origin named Javi, played by Pedro Pascal. From there, a beautiful concoction of action-adventure-buddy-comedy-family-drama — with a little romance, mystery and spy-thriller thrown in — begins to simmer and meld, its fragrant notes combining into a delightfully bizarre bouquet.
I screened Massive Talent while crunching away on potato chips in a small movie theater at the Lionsgate offices in Santa Monica, which I had all to myself, affording me the luxury of sprawling out and laughing loudly, which I did on multiple occasions while slurping the seltzer I smuggled in my purse. It’s a movie by and for Nicolas Cage lovers, and it does not disappoint. After years of watching Cage get criticized for every little thing, it’s nice to see him back on top.
But then again, what is fame in America without a healthy dose of ridicule?
After small roles, including one in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cage broke out in 1983’s Valley Girl, then appeared in Rumble Fish, directed by his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. (Cage was born Nicolas Kim Coppola.)
He has been a household name since at least 1987, when he starred in both the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona and Norman Jewison’s romantic comedy Moonstruck, opposite the one and only Cher.
He followed those up with Robert Bierman’s 1988 horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss (that one screengrab of Cage as a wide-eyed, newly minted vampire is responsible for many a meme just on its own) and David Lynch’s 1990 crime story Wild at Heart. In 1994, he starred in Andrew Bergman’s rom-com It Could Happen to You, and then earned his Oscar, for best lead actor, in Mike Figgis’ 1995 drama Leaving Las Vegas. Cage played the totally loveable but irreparably damaged Ben Sanderson, who, after a series of unfortunate events, heads to Sin City with the single-minded goal of drinking himself to death.
Nicolas Cage on the set of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Photo by Elisabeth Caren / Lionsgate.
If all of those credits weren’t impressive enough, Cage’s next few years gave him his most famous roles yet — the devilish imp Castor Troy, opposite John Travolta in John Woo’s Face/Off; FBI chemical warfare expert Stanley Goodspeed, next to Sean Connery’s former spy, in Michael Bay’s The Rock; and the golden-locked Southern charmer action hero Cameron Poe in Simon West’s Con Air. In the years after that, he won over a new generation as American history buff Ben Gates in Jon Turteltaub’s 2004 smash-hit National Treasure.
But the decade or so that followed found Cage in hot water. It’s no secret that the actor went through a series of financial blunders, and that not all of his contemporary films have gotten rave reviews. However, there were always some gems mixed into the bunch, like the 2013 family drama Joe, directed by David Gordon Green, who actually makes an appearance in Massive Talent.
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