Tiffany Haddish has joined the cast of Nicolas Cage’s upcoming meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage plays a fictional version of famous Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage. As reported by THR, Haddish will be playing a government agent who convinces Cage to go undercover to bring down an international crime boss, played by Pedro Pascal. Based on that sentence alone, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is going to be the greatest motion picture of all time.
Directed by Tom Gormican (Ghosted) from a script by Gormican and Kevin Etten (Workaholics, Desperate Housewives), the movie follows a washed-up Cage who accepts a $1 million invitation to appear at the birthday party of one of his biggest fans, who also happens to be a ruthless kingpin. It won’t be Cage’s first foray into meta territory - he plays a bizarre version of Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman’s nonexistent brother struggling to write a screenplay in Adaptation, and in the 2018 supernatural thriller Between Worlds Cage plays a truck driver who has sex with a possessed woman while reading a book written by Nicolas Cage. The man has never been afraid to swing for the fences, and the addition of Haddish to the cast of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent indicates that it will be steering hard into broadly comedic territory, which is great news.
Unfortunately, there’s no indication of when we’ll finally be able to watch this masterpiece (any release date beyond “immediately” is disappointing), but odds are it won’t debut until next year at the earliest. Luckily there’s plenty of fresh Cage to tide us over, including Cage fighting a mountain lion and Kevin Durand in Primal and Cage having a Lovecraftian freakout over tomatoes in Color Out of Space. For more Cage, check out our list of the actor's best performances, ranked.