Nic Cage on the ‘deeply humbling experience’ of playing himself
Laura Harding hears of sending himself up in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent
Nicolas Cage is an incredibly polite man. “Thank you so much for having me,” he says, sweetly, at the start of our interview.
“Thank you for asking,” he adds, as our chat gets under way. These are the kind of diligent manners you might not expect from an actor whose persona looms as large as Cage’s.
Part of a Hollywood dynasty (his real name is Nicolas Kim Coppola, The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, is his uncle), he is a man of many contradictions.
An Oscar winner for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, he has also starred in hits such as Adaptation, which bagged him a second Oscar nod, Raising Arizona, Face/off, Con Air, The Rock, National Treasure and Gone In Sixty Seconds.
He has worked with revered directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, but also starred in some lessthan-stellar projects.
He is the subject of a feverish online fandom and a Cagethemed film festival called Cage-o-rama, (“Scotland’s first Nicolas Cage film festival”) yet debate has raged whether he really is a good actor or not.
Now 58, it is notable that he has enough humility and selfdeprecating good humour to star in a film in which he sends up every element of his outsize public image, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent.
In it he plays a version of himself who is unfulfilled by his career and facing financial ruin, losing out on parts he auditions for in the valet queue at the celeb hotspot Chateau Marmont, and distanced from his teenage daughter, who thinks he is a self-involved narcissist,
In desperate need of cash, he accepts a one million dollar offer to travel to Europe to attend a wealthy fan’s birthday party, but things take a wildly unexpected turn when it turns out the fan, played by Pedro Pascal, is a drug kingpin and he is recruited by the CIA for an undercover mission. Most actors and their outsize egos, would run very far and very fast from a role that portrays them as an out-of work has-been, but Cage did not.
“Listen, I did run,” he admits. “I said ‘no, no, no, no’. And then Tom Gormican [the film’s director] had his fishing line and he reeled me back in with a letter, which was a sensitive letter and it was an intelligent letter, and I knew then that he wasn’t trying to do a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch that was mocking socalled Nick Cage, but he had some genuine interest in the earlier work.
“And one of my mantras is the very thing you’re afraid of – more often than not, as long as you’re not hurting yourself, or someone else – is probably the thing you should move towards, because you may learn something from the experience or grow in some way.
“And I can tell you that this was a deeply humbling experience, but there was no muscle in my body that told me I should play Nick Cage in a movie.”
“The big discrepancy in the movie from the real me is that there’s no version of Nick Cage that doesn’t want to spend time with his children, and my family always comes first,” Cage says passionately.
● The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is in UK cinemas today