Pedro Pascal reveals the Nic Cage performance he channeled while shooting 'Wonder Woman 1984'

Pedro Pascal's performance as a Nicolas Cage super-fan named Javi in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was not the biggest stretch for The Mandalorian actor given Pascal's longtime real-life fondness for Cage's work.

"I started fairly early," says Pascal, whose Massive Weight character pays Cage (playing a fictionalized version of himself in the film) $1 million for the Oscar-winner to attend his birthday party.

"We got cable television in my house when I was quite young, so, on cable, Valley Girl and Birdy and Racing With the Moon and Rumble Fish, they were all playing," Pascal continues. "Then I went to the theater with my father and I saw Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Vampire's Kiss, Moonstruck, Wild at Heart, which starts the '90s. Then you get into Leaving Las Vegas, Honeymoon in Vegas. I mean, listen, I've really have seen them all. I can't pick a favorite. But I would say that Adaptation is one of the best screen performances in the history of movies."

Pascal even channeled some "Cage rage" from one of the films he had seen while growing up when he played the character of businessman Maxwell "Max Lord" Lorenzano in the DC movie Wonder Woman 1984. Which one? 1989's Vampire's Kiss, in which Cage gives one of his most entertainingly bonkers performances as an ambitious, egomaniacal literary agent who believes he is becoming a bloodsucker.

"I remember shooting a scene in 1984 and, in the instant, I was like, what kind of energy do I need here?" says Pascal. "And I remembered Nicolas Cage — before I ever met him, before the thought of ever making Massive Talent existed — I remembered him jumping on the desk in Vampire's Kiss, kind of torturing María Conchita Alonso [who portrays a secretary at the company where Cage's character works]. I remembered that scene and his energy, and obviously not deciding to do that, but just wanting a fraction of that kind of chaotic energy to make the scene that we were shooting that day work."

Pascal talks more about The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, opening in cinemas on April 22., in the video above.

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