The worst experience of Nicolas Cage’s career: “The most disgusting, horrible memory”
Even though he fell so far from grace that he went from an Academy Award-winning A-list action hero to a slumming staple of the straight-to-video circuit, Nicolas Cage doesn’t have many regrets from a career that’s spanned more than 40 years and witnessed the highest of highs and lowest of lows.
An actor would be entitled to be pissed off about their position in the industry had they tumbled down a slope as steep as Cage, even if it was partially his own fault. Years of rampant overspending left him millions of dollars in the hole, which was the main driving force behind his decade in the VOD doldrums.
It’s not a coincidence that since settling those financial issues, he’s embarked on a resurgence that stands a good chance of being remembered as his greatest-ever period, even if his days of being marketed as the main attraction of a blockbuster release appear to have been permanently consigned to the history books.
Now that he’s debt-free and able to get really weird again, Cage has felt like an actor reborn. Sure, he’s not too thrilled that his back catalogue has been reduced to an endless cycle of memes, but he couldn’t have predicted the rise of social media and how two hours of cinema would be reduced to a single GIF when he first introduced ‘Nouveau Shamanism’ to the masses.
Whether he’s wearing a gigantic prosthetic nose for a one-scene cameo, slathering his toes in hot yoghurt to get into the right mindset for a love scene, or working closely with an alcoholic coach to ensure his onscreen inebriation is as authentic as possible, Cage has never had any issues with going above and beyond in the name of performance.
Never was that truer than when he scoffed down a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss, which was arguably the first time an unsuspecting world was given a glimpse of just how far down the eccentric rabbit hole he was willing to go. As it turns out, the actor made a semi-calculated decision with eyes on gaining attention.
“I was trying to get on the map,” he admitted to Lee Cowan. “I was trying to make a big noise, like punk rock, and say, ‘Look at me. I’m here, and I want you to remember me’. I heard stories about Ozzy Osbourne and all that, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s wild.'”
Whereas Ozzy bit the head clean off a bat, Cage inhaled a cockroach. Spiritually similar to a certain degree and equally shocking. “I could tell you it was the most disgusting, horrible memory of any experience on a movie set,” he confessed. “But people are still talking about it.”
He’s not wrong; the cockroach scene from Vampire’s Kiss remains one of the most unforgettable from his entire career, but would that be the case if the sequence had played out without an unwitting insect being sacrificed in the name of his art? It’s debatable.
