MOVIE NEWS – Not many actors other than Nicolas Cage can claim to have turned down roles in iconic films such as Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. But the actor has put his family above even such legendary roles!

Nicolas Cage has a reputation for not turning down roles. But in his latest interview with People, in which he talked about the upcoming The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, he revealed that he has turned down roles before. And not just any roles!

He said that for both Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, he felt he could not afford to be away from his family and especially his son, Weston Coppola Cage, for so many years. For both The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, he would have had to spend at least three years in New Zealand or Australia, which would have been too much to spend without his loved ones.

Nicolas Cage has said that he does not agree with stars who put themselves and the pursuit of fame before everything else, including their private lives, because it leads to failure in one way or another. He parodies a similar phenomenon with his film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which he plays Nick Cage (i.e. himself), a successful actor who doesn’t really care about anything but his career. But that all changes when his family is kidnapped by an obsessed fan and Nick realises that his loved ones are more important than anything else. So the actor sets out to save his family, using his former action hero personas against the fanatical hostage-keeper (Pedro Pascal).

According to Nicolas Cage, the film’s Nick Cage is the complete opposite of him in terms of priorities, as he himself tries to draw conclusions from the mistakes of actors who think too highly of themselves and eventually fall victim to their own hybris, like the film’s Nick Cage.

“First and foremost … there’s no version of Nic Cage in reality that doesn’t want to spend time with his children. There’s no version of Nic Cage that didn’t put family first over career. I turned down Lord of the Rings and I turned down Matrix because I didn’t want to go to New Zealand for three years or Australia for three years because I needed to be home with my son Weston, that’s a fact. So there is a huge disparity between that Nick Cage in Massive Talent and the Nic Cage sitting in front of you right now.”

“I always say to myself, ‘I never had a career, only work.’ What I mean by that is sometimes — and I won’t mention names — but when you get into this career-minded perception of one’s self it can be a slippery slope, and it can lead to things where you start believing in your own mythos and you start taking yourself way too seriously. You become pretentious and then you fall into the realm of diva, and that’s when mistakes happen in your personal life and on camera.”

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent will debut in cinemas tomorrow, on 22 April 2022.

Source: MovieWeb