The actor will play a version of himself accepting $1m to attend a superfan’s party in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Nicolas Cage is to play himself in a film called The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, it has been announced.

Deadline reports that Cage will play a fictionalised version of himself in what is described as a “meta” story, in which he is paid $1m to attend a wealthy superfan’s birthday party. According to the plot description, he has to “become a version of some of his most iconic and beloved characters in order to extricate himself from an increasingly dangerous situation”.

Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, creators of the paranormal-investigators TV comedy Ghosted, are behind the script, with Gormican lined up to direct.

The idea inevitably recalls the surreal comedy Being John Malkovich, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, in which a puppeteer played by John Cusack discovers a portal that takes him inside Malkovich’s head. Cage himself starred in a similarly tricksy Kaufman/Jonze project, the 2002 release Adaptation, in which he played a version of Kaufman and his (non-existent) twin brother as he wrestled with a screenplay adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief.