In Unbearable Weight, the real Cage is called on to embody all this at once, while finding enough reality within the parody to persuade us that both he and his fictional counterpart should be taken seriously after all. That is, indeed, a lot of weight to carry – and how can any aspect of the task not feel personal?

Cage is the latest in a long line of screen performers who have played themselves, or approximations of themselves with the same name. On TV, comedians especially have often done it as a matter of course, from George Burns or Tony Hancock in the 1950s and ’60s to Larry David or Steve Coogan today.

Sometimes this is just a matter of showbiz convention, rooted in a tradition of live performance that blurs the line between reality and fiction (as in stand-up, where the performer addresses the actual audience from behind a comic mask). But in a variety of contexts, this line can also be blurred in a more self-conscious, systematic way.

The latter is the sort of thing which we typically call “meta”, and which has sometimes been discussed under the heading of postmodernism, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, when breaking the fourth wall was in vogue across culture high and low.

A high culture example would be Wim Wenders’ 1987 arthouse hit Wings of Desire, shot in West Berlin just before the end of the Cold War and starring Bruno Ganz as an angel who turns human for love. (Cage coincidentally played a version of this character in the 1998 Hollywood remake City of Angels, which changed the setting to LA.)

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Wings of Desire is a film preoccupied with dissolving boundaries: between the spiritual and physical, for instance, and equally the imaginary and the real. This allows Columbo star Peter Falk to show up as a version of himself, an American actor who happens to be shooting a film in Germany – and who, we’re told, was once an angel too.

Back in the pop culture heartland of 1980s American TV, stand-up comic Garry Shandling was dissolving boundaries in his own way with his sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. The novelty wasn’t that he played the character of Garry Shandling, but that this character was fully aware of existing within a sitcom, chatting with the studio audience about what might happen next.

Meta-ness seemingly could go no further. But Shandling went on to unpack the logic of self-portaiture in a different way in his 1990s follow-up The Larry Sanders Show, where he starred as a neurotic late-night talk-show host whose life appears to be one long performance.

On his show within the show, Larry played host to an endless stream of celebrity guests, including Jim Carrey, Sharon Stone, David Duchovny and literally hundreds of others. Behind the scenes, most were portrayed as obnoxious, eccentric, or at least vastly unlike their on-camera selves – though this if anything enhanced the credibility of the actual celebrities willing to play along.

This joke was taken up in later sitcoms such as Ricky Gervais’ Extras, and has since grown so common that it’s been run into the ground – as is implicitly acknowledged in the 2013 horror-comedy This Is the End, with Seth Rogen, James Franco and their mates as drug-addled Hollywood insiders partying their way through the apocalypse.

The finale of The Larry Sanders Show aired in 1998, when the internet as we now know it had only just achieved lift-off. But in hindsight, its satire of the manufactured nature of talk-show “spontaneity” looks remarkably prescient, anticipating a world where celebrities are routinely expected to “play themselves” across a range of platforms, from traditional media to podcasts to Instagram and Twitter.

And it’s not just celebrities: the game of fashioning and polishing a public image has become one that everybody can play. That in turn seems prefigured in another work from the same era, the 1999 absurdist satire Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze from a script by Charlie Kaufman.
The ingenious plot centres on a portal that allows anyone to briefly inhabit the mind of the famous actor (playing himself, naturally), a surreal concept that feels oddly familiar in an era that allows us to follow the fleeting thoughts of celebrities on social media.

Familiar, too, is how the main attraction seems to be fame as such. Everybody wants to be Malkovich, but in the film, nobody can remember much about him, even the titles of his films. In person, too, he registers as something of a blank – which licenses the actual Malkovich to give a bravura performance as a figure whose identity keeps shifting.

But if this is a joke about the emptiness of celebrity, it is one that rebounds on itself. If Malkovich were playing a straightforwardly fictional character, it wouldn’t be the same because the audience is also enticed by the prospect of getting closer to the actual Malkovich, however much of an illusion that might be.

And is it just an illusion? As Cage implies in his comments on Unbearable Weight, to play yourself in the strictest sense is impossible: all you can ever play is an imagined version of yourself. But equally, whatever character an actor might play, they only have themselves to draw on and their choices have the potential to be revealing.

For the viewer, following an actor through this maze can be an invitation to ponder not just the identity of the figure on screen but the larger riddle of identity itself. Ultimately, it might lead to a question that perhaps everyone should ask themselves at one time or another: if I stopped playing myself, who would I be?

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent opens on April 21.

Other actors who’ve played themselves

Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (1996)

At the peak of her Hong Kong stardom, the fictional Cheung agrees to appear in a remake of a French silent classic, shooting in Paris, where she becomes a bewildered object of fascination to everyone around her. Adding another wing to the hall of mirrors, Cheung was later briefly married to her French director, Olivier Assayas, now remaking the film for HBO with Alicia Vikander.

Steve Coogan in Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Tristram Shandy (2005) and The Trip (2010) and its sequels

By now the self-absorbed British comic Steve Coogan must rank as the real Coogan’s second most beloved character (just behind dim-witted broadcaster Alan Partridge). Ironically, much of his popularity stems from his uncanny impersonations of other people, especially when sparring with frenemy Rob Brydon across the four seasons of The Trip.

Jean-Claude van Damme in JCVD (2008)

In his native Belgium, the martial arts champion turned action star is caught up in a hostage situation that tests his capacity to play the hero in real life – and at the same time lets him reveal an emotional range unsuspected by all but his biggest fans.

Joaquin Phoenix in I’m Still Here (2010)

Sick of the falsity of Hollywood, Phoenix makes a disastrous bid to reinvent himself as a hip-hop performer in this mockumentary masterminded by his friend Casey Affleck. Phoenix’s apparent meltdown, staged in public over many months, was taken seriously by many till the penny dropped.

Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine (2016)

Known for her versatility in low-budget indie films, Sheil does double duty on this harrowing mockumentary, playing herself as she supposedly prepares to tackle the ethically tricky role of real-life Cleveland TV presenter Christine Chubbuck, who committed suicide live on air in 1974.

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