Daniel Day-Lewis was in line to play Nicolas Cage in ‘The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent’

nme.com:

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent have revealed that Daniel Day-Lewis was once in line to play Nicolas Cage in the new film.The movie sees Cage play a fictionalised version of himself alongside the likes of Pedro Pascal and Tiffany Haddish, who portray different characters to their actual selves.Writers Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten have opened up about early struggles getting the film made, with Cage initially hesitant to take on the role of playing himself.“We were told that Nick has done these projects before and he’s not wild about Nick as Nick,” Etten recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “And we weren’t two guys who had a huge body of work that you could point to and be like, ‘No, trust us.’“We knew that we needed to have a real offer to go along with the script.

So eventually we got studio interest and once a couple of studios came on board, that’s when it started to become real.”Gormican added: “But the funny part about that was we have a bunch of studios interested in the script, and ordinarily as a writer you’re going, ‘Oh my God, this is like the best possible version of how this could have gone.’“But there’s an asterisk on all of this, meaning, if he doesn’t want to do it, your sale goes away.

Like, ‘By the way, we don’t want this fucking thing if he’s not in it.’ There is no other version of it. When he was reading the script it was like this sort of double anxiety.