Nicolas Cage is getting ready to play his toughest role yet: Nick Cage. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage is portraying a fictionalized version of himself who goes to a birthday party for an eccentric millionaire who loves the actor named Javi (played by Pedro Pascal). The movie has been met with rave reviews and Cage took to Reddit's famed AMA to answer some questions from his fans about his work and his new movie.
One of the questions he was asked was about working with co-star Pascal in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and any stories he'd like to share. "First and foremost, Pedro Pascal is a genuinely nice man," he wrote. "You couldn’t ask for a nicer more pleasant person to work with. Second he has a very unique sense of humor. It’s the kind of sense of humor where I don’t know if he’s really making a joke or he isn’t making a joke. Such as comment about the appearance of a cabbage in a cabbage field. And it made me wonder if he was a method actor and was in character and adding a kind of confused dimension to the Javi role, or if he genuinely thought the cabbage was amusing. I am still confounded by this. I mean who makes a joke about cabbage, except him? It’s just not funny!"
But the AMA itself ranged from questions about Cage's roles, his hopes for future projects, and what directors he'd like to work with. "I would love to work with Christopher Nolan. I would love to work with Ari Aster, I would love to work with Robert Egger. Spike Lee too."
Cage was honest through most of his AMA, giving fans a look into what movies he'd like to see himself in the future "I would like to play Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo because of the character’s love of the ocean I share that with him," or if any of the movie quotes that people holler at him in public annoy him "I don’t have a problem with any of the quotes, I’m glad they remember the movie."
One of the turning points recently for Cage was his work in the Michael Sarnoski film Pig. Cage started talking about the film when asked why he decided to do it and how it was different from a lot of his work. "Thank you. I was interested in returning to a more quiet, naturalistic style of film performance, having done a series of more operatic performance styles. The movie feels rather like a folk song to me or a poem, and the character of Rob was contending with tremendous grief and self imposed isolation and I think we as a group of people experiencing a pandemic in 2020-21 we’re probably also having similar feelings of loss and isolation and it communicated to a nerve we were all experiencing. It's one of my favorite movies, and it's probably my best work."
And most importantly to me, Cage's response to whether or not he would do a Face/Off 2? A resounding "Yes." The entire AMA is a treat not only for fans of Cage but for anyone who loves movies as he deep-dives into his friendships (like saying how he is spellbound by Ethan Hawke's talent) and it's just a genuinely fun read!