See Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal Team Up In First Look At The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal hang out in the first images from their upcoming movie!

By Michileen Martin | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

nicolas cage pedro pascal

You’re a crime boss with money to burn and a birthday party coming up — what do you do? Well, if you’re Pedro Pascal’s character in the upcoming meta action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, you dole out a king’s ransom to get Nicolas Cage to come to your party and hang out. And hopefully, you get a few anecdotes about working with Sean Connery in The Rock or whether or not he thinks he could take John Travolta in a fight.

The first images from the upcoming The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent have been released and they look promising. While the film is described as an action comedy, most of the images released so far appear to be from calmer moments in the story. We see Nicolas Cage — playing a fictionalized version of himself — with Pascal’s Javi swimming, lounging next to water, and leisurely driving through the wilderness. You can see the images below.

nicolase cage the unbearable weight of massive talent
Photo by Lionsgate
pedro pascal the unbearable weight of massive talent
Photo by Lionsgate
pedro pascal the unbearable weight of massive talent
Photo by Lionsgate

The film will find Nicolas Cage playing what the actor called a “highly-neurotic, anxiety-ridden version” of himself. You can see that just a bit in the images — particularly in the photo of the pair sitting on a stone stair way and in the image of them in the ocean — when Cage seems to be unleashing a signature, forced, crazed laughter. It’s for this reason, Cage said, that he’ll never see the film.

Nicolas Cage doesn’t think he could bear to witness the version of himself he plays in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Back in July, Cage said he would never see the movie, not even at the premiere. “I’m told it’s a good movie,” Cage said. “I’m told people love it and are enjoying the ride, but I made that for the audience. It’s too much for me to go to the premiere and sit there with everybody. Psychologically, that’s too bizarre and whacked out for me.” Cage also made it clear to Collider that he wasn’t “this neurotic, high-strung, anxiety-ridden guy all the time.”

The fictional Nicolas Cage will apparently find himself down on his luck in the upcoming flick, which is why he agrees to the offer of $1 million from Pedro Pascal’s Javi. Pascal’s crime boss is reportedly a Nicolas Cage super-fan — so enamored with the actor he has a wax statue of Cage in his home. At some point things go a little sideways — no doubt connected to Javi’s occupation — and Cage is forced to assume the roles of some of the outlandish heroes he’s played.

nicolas cage the unberable weight of massive talent
Photo by Lionsgate

According to Entertainment Weekly, Nicolas Cage will be pulling double duty like he did in 2002’s Adaptation. Cage will not only be playing a fictionalized version of himself, but will also play Nicky — a kind of imaginary friend version of himself who is supposed to represent what the real Cage was like around the late ’80s, early ’90s. So a version of Nicolas Cage imagined by a fictional version of Nicolas Cage — talk about meta.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is scheduled for a theatrical release of April 22, 2022. It’s directed by Tom Gormican (That Awkward Moment) and co-written by Gormican and Kevin Etten (Ghosted). The film stars Nicolas Cage as Nic Cage, Pedro Pascal as Javi Guttierez, Neil Patrick Harris as Cage’s agent, Sharon Horgan (Catastrophe) as Cage’s ex-wife, newcomer Lily Sheen as Cage’s daughter, and Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) as a CIA agent.