Nicolas Cage almost didn’t play Nicolas Cage in his new movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

The 58-year-old actor portrays a fictionalized version of himself in the flick, opposite Pedro Pascal, and in a new interview, screenwriters Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten opened up about their contingency plan just in case Nicolas said no to the role.

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Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Tom and Kevin revealed that it was quite a difficult process where there was only one actor they wanted for his part.

“We were told that Nic has done these projects before and he’s not wild about Nic as Nick,” Kevin shared said. “And we weren’t two guys who had a huge body of work that you could point to and be like, ‘No, trust us.’”

Tom added that “the funny part about that was we have a bunch of studios interested in the script, 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 f***ing 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. It’s not like if he doesn’t do it, we’ll offer it to somebody else. It was gone,” he said.

While they were waiting on Nic‘s answer, the two did consider two other actors to play the movie’s version of Nicolas Cage.

“There were times when I think I… was trying to talk myself into other ideas,” Kevin shared. “The only actually good idea — I don’t know whose it was — was to have either Christian Bale or Daniel Day-Lewis playing Nic Cage.”

He continued, “Nobody else who really has a mixture of the super high talent he has and the goodwill of people wanting him to succeed.”

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

If you missed it, see what Pedro shared about working with Nicolas on the movie here…