Nic Cage plays the character of a lifetime — Nick Cage, in the new film, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”

The fictional Nick is facing a flailing acting career and financial ruin. He accepts a birthday party gig for a million dollars from Javi, a super-fan played by actor Pedro Pascal.

“Five words: No, no, no, no, no, I didn't want to do it. There was no muscle in my body that told me to do it. I said if he was still alive get Gene Wilder. That's no, no, no, we don't play ourselves in movies. We create characters. I was horrified,” said Cage.

Co-writer Kevin Etten admits he was afraid Cage would not take the script as a compliment when he sent it for him to read.

“What we did was we wrote a letter that went along with this script to try to put it into some context that this is a love letter,” said Etten. “This is a celebration of you and your work. And it's a chance for you to kind of like play with what people think you are and who you actually are. And I think he got that.”
 
Cage read the script and loved the idea of playing another character in the film, Nicky. Nicky is the voice inside his character’s head who is hung up on being the nephew of Cage’s real-life uncle, Francis Ford Coppola.

“I thought I could have so much fun with him,” said Cage. “That guy was irreverent. He was obnoxious. He was arrogant. Nicky is somebody that wanted to be a movie star because he thought that if he was a movie star, people wouldn't just say, Oh, you're only there because of Francis Coppola being your uncle. You can't generate $6 billion in box office simply because you're Francis Coppola, his nephew, you have to be a movie star. And I used to think like that early on, which is a not a great way to think and I'm glad I'm no longer like that.”

Actress Lily Sheen plays Cage’s on-screen daughter Addy.  They don’t get along very well because the fictional Cage hasn’t been the perfect dad. In real life, Sheen knows what it’s like to have famous acting parents — her parents are Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen.

“It was very interesting for me to be able to work off kind of this alternate universe in which my relationship with my parents wasn't what it was,” Sheen said. "And I can see, you know, it's not like a shocking story in Hollywood, this is a very easy thing to happen, that relationships can get really frayed. And I feel really lucky to have not had to like suffer through that.”

Cage said making the film was a gamble, but he’s glad he took a chance when he saw an audience’s reaction to it at a recent screening.

“The downside on this movie was huge,” said Cage. “It could have been laughable for all the wrong reasons, and a train wreck. But the upside was also huge. The upside was that it could be what I experienced in the cinema. I was like back in 1980 on 42nd Street, and we were all laughing together. And we were having fun together. And that's what that's when something really works with the movie in the so-called Church of Cinema where we're all together, and we're laughing and the fact the audience becomes like a family.”

“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is playing now in theaters.