Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage has said he regrets eating live cockroaches on camera for 1998 cult comedy Vampire’s Kiss, telling Yahoo Entertainment that he’ll “never do that again”.
Vampire’s Kiss stars Cage as publishing executive Peter Loew, who thinks he’s turning into a vampire. In the scene in question, Loew picks up a cockroach that is scuttling across the cooker in his apartment and then eats it whole for breakfast. The film’s script originally called for Cage to swallow a raw egg instead, but Cage insisted it be a cockroach.
“I saw it as a business decision because when people see the cockroach go in my mouth… [they] really react,” he said during the film’s DVD commentary track.
In another recent interview with Mediacorp, Cage reflected further on his bug-eating days. “I think the one experience I had in Vampire’s Kiss was enough,” he said. “Every time I think about it I’m sometimes traumatised by it and I don’t ever want to do it again or anything like it again.”
Cage is currently starring in Renfield, a spin-off comedy horror about Dracula’s long-suffering assistant R. M. Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult. For this film, it was Hoult who had to eat the cockroaches, not Cage.
“The cockroaches I got to eat in this were caramel,” Hoult told Yahoo. “I also had crickets that were actually quite yummy; they were salt and vinegar-flavoured or barbecue smoky-flavoured.”
“[Nicholas] ate a potato bug, so he took it to another level,” Cage added. “[Potato bugs] are terrifying to me, and so are cockroaches.”
“It wasn’t good,” Hoult confirmed. “It didn’t dry out so good, and tasted every bit of bug.”
In other Cage-related news, the Face/Off star recently ranked his five favourite movies that he’s made – including crime drama Joe, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, Martin Scorsese classic Bringing Out The Dead, surrealist horror Mandy and his favourite ever, kidnap-thriller Pig, in which he plays a truffle hunter who has to track down his stolen hog.
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