Trivia / The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

• Acclaimed Flop: The movie earned very positive reviews and word of mouth, but failed to recoup its $30 million budget at the box office.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Nicky originally went by, "Young Nick Cage," and emulated Cameron Poe. Nicolas Cage renamed him, and reshaped his persona with the arrogance Cage exhibited in this 1990 interview.
  • Nicolas Cage's love of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari passed on to Nick and Javi, though Addy doesn't care for it.
• Actor-Inspired Heroism: The original story started out depicting Nick Cage as an absentee father to Addy. Nicolas Cage warned that this would make him seem too unsympathetic, especially since the real Cage never neglects his children. The final film has Nick make efforts at the beginning to spend time with Addy, but struggle to form common ground.
• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Like Javi Gutierrez, Pedro Pascal is also a movie nerd who was inspired by Nicolas Cage to entertain the public, and can't handle praise for his own work.
    Pedro Pascal: People keep saying, 'Oh, we haven't seen you do comedy before' and weirdly, this is more of myself than so many other things that I may be known for.
  • Lily Sheen, the real life daughter of Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen, plays the daughter of a famous actor.
• Approval of God: In a "career retrospective" sponsored by SAG-AFTRA in early 2024, Pedro Pascal chose the memes of a drugged Javi staring lovingly at Nick as his favorites spawned from his work.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: The screenplay excited Nicolas Cage with the thought of pastiching his younger self.
  Nicolas Cage: I wasn't too excited about the idea of playing myself, but when Tom [Gormican] sent me this script, Nicky reminded me a little of Jerry Lewis' Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor. I always admired what he did with that movie. For me, Nicky steals the show.
• Blooper: When Nick and Javi trade their left shoes, Pedro Pascal instead receives the right slip-on, which Nick already passed to Javi earlier.
• California Doubling:
  • Scenes set in Mallorca, Spain were actually filmed in either Budapest, Hungary, or Dubrovnik, Croatia.
  • Olivia's Los Angeles house is actually located in Budapest.
• The Cast Showoff: Pedro Pascal, a former competitive swimmer, shows off his aquatic talents in an homage to Leaving Las Vegas, in which Javi dives into his pool, to find Nick drinking at the bottom.
• Creator Backlash: Despite Nicolas Cage's eagerness to sign on, he has also stated that he would never see the film as he's uncomfortable with watching a version of himself on screen that he feels isn't an accurate representation of who he actually is.
• Dawson Casting: 21 year old Lily Sheen plays 16 year old Addy.
• Deleted Scene:
  • Javi originally ended Nick's tour of his estate by revealing that he chose the title of one of Nick's least popular movies for the Wi-Fi password.
  • A series of vignettes where Nick reprised his characters from movies like Face/Off, Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), and Con Air in a surrealist setting reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was filmed but cut for time. The home media releases include the completed vignettes as bonus features.
  • The Truth or Dare scene once included a session of Nick teaching Javi how to impersonate Stanley Godspeed. Unlike the two aforementioned scenes, this one doesn't even appear in the home media bonus features.
  • Some B-Roll posted online briefly shows Gabriela assuring Javi of her love for him some time during the third act (judging by Javi's shirt).
• Enforced Method Acting: Lily Sheen genuinely laughed when Nicolas Cage improvised a Meme Acknowledgement to The Wicker Man (2006) while filming the ending.
• Executive Meddling: In an instance of the executives helping to improve the movie, the writers added the Mushroom Samba sequence after Lionsgate presidents told them to add more comedy when Nick and Javi begin writing.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Chilean-American Pedro Pascal as Spanish Javi Gutierrez, complete with Pascal thickening his Latino vocal tones.
  • British Lily Sheen plays Cage’s fictional daughter Addy, and while her mother is Irish, she speaks with an American accent.
• Feelies: Wal-Mart sells the Blu-ray together with a Nicolas Cage T-shirt, and the Ultra HD release with poster-inspired cover art, both with and without the shirt.
• Life Imitates Art: The movie that Javi and Nick write about their friendship earns a standing ovation at the premiere. When The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent premiered at SXSW, it also earned widespread praise, temporarily resulting in a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.
• Missing Trailer Scene:
  • The trailers show a deleted nighttime scene of Javi watching Nick shoot some empty bottles.
  • The second trailer briefly shows Nick and Javi diving into the sea a second time, to escape a squad of killers sent by Lucas.
• Orphaned Reference: When Addy takes a ride in Javi's truck, Nick asks if she wants any apples, tying in with a deleted scene in which Nick and Javi smoke some marijuana, then munch on some fruit.^note A shot of Javi chewing and swallowing one last bite of apple appears to have slipped into the final film, before Nick asks if Javi put on new loafers.
• Playing Against Type:
  • This movie provides one of the rare farces in Nicolas Cage's and Pedro Pascal's respective filmographies, and Pascal's first action movie since The Great Wall in which he doesn't play a paternal role. Javi lampshades the latter while lamenting that since he and Gabriela can't get married, they can't have children, either.
  • Comedians Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz play two of the movie's most serious characters, between Vivian's constant concern for Maria's safety, and Martin's skepticism regarding Nick's credentials for espionage. Tom Gormican required them to treat the kidnapping subplot with urgency, but also maintain the lighthearted tone of the main plot.
• Playing with Character Type: Pedro Pascal has previously played several characters' Evil All Along friends. This movie constantly teases that Javi might be evil, but ultimately disproves it. Javi's Ambiguously Bi sexuality also plays with Pascal's instances of playing characters who explicitly love other men.
• Promoted Fanboy: Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten, and all of the major actors have sustaining interests in Nicolas Cage and his movies. Pedro Pascal in particular cited Cage as his "biggest influence" on his acting.
• Release Date Change: From March 19, 2021 to April 22, 2022.
• Revised Ending: Reportedly, the version shown at test screenings last shows Javi on a beach with Gabriela, calling Nick to learn about their movie's reception. The completed version last shows him chatting with Nick in person on opening night.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The scenes where Nick and Javi salute each other resulted from COVID restrictions forbidding the actors from shaking hands.
• Short Run in Peru: In some European countries, the digital copy became available to rent a day earlier than the American digital release date.
• Spared by the Cut: The deleted homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ended with Nick shooting Nicky. The final film implies that Nicky still resides somewhere in Nick's mind, by having him deliver the last line from offscreen.
• Those Two Actors: This is the third time Ike Barinholtz and Tiffany Haddish have starred in a project, the first being Barinholtz's 2018 film, The Oath, and the second being the Apple TV+ comedy mystery series (also released in 2022), The Afterparty.
• Throw It In!:
  • After Vivian tells Nick that she and her nephew love Croods 2, Cage threw in a shout-out to co-star Emma Stone.
  • In the script, Nick was only supposed to kiss Nicky on the cheek. It was Cage's idea for them to French kiss instead, after he figured that starring in a tribute to himself felt not unlike making love to himself.
  • Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal improvised the scene in which Nick and Javi both change the design of the sequined pillow, since Cage really did feel creeped out by seeing himself on it.
  • After Olivia complains that she couldn't find anyone to feed her cats during her stay in Mallorca, Pedro Pascal improvised Javi's response to her worries of coming home to the stench of dead cats:
    Well, I had a cat die in the kitchen once. And my grandmother was never able to get rid of the smell.
  • When Nick explains why his belt at the movie premiere has a tarantula-shaped buckle, Nicolas Cage added a reenactment of The Wicker Man (2006); exclaiming that he turned down a bee-shaped buckle by insisting, "Not the bees!"
• Viral Marketing: Lionsgate launched a MySpace-like social media platform for Cage fans as a tie-in with the movie.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An early draft took place in Mexico, until the COVID-19 pandemic required Lionsgate to relocate the shoot from Colombia, to the aforementioned European countries. This also changed the ethnicities of several characters, including Javi.
  • The director Nick was auditioning for at the start of the movie was originally written to be Quentin Tarantino, and was also offered to David Lynch.
  • The aforementioned script only has Nick meet one CIA agent, a man named Irving. By the time filming began, Vivian replaced him.
  • Nicolas Cage at one point wanted to play Javi instead of himself, finding some meta humor in the thought of portraying his own biggest fan. However, Pedro Pascal swiftly assured him that he could do the role justice.
• Written by Cast Member: Nicolas Cage wrote the song he drunkenly performs at Addy's birthday party. The original script has him sing Guns N' Roses' "November Rain," but Cage doubted he could reach notes that high.

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