Like so many of us, Nicolas Cage regrets eating live cockroaches
Who among us hasn’t said, “I’m sorry I did it at all,” when discussing eating live cockroaches for a movie role
Aux News Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage isn’t one to apologize for a Gonzo performance. He didn’t apologize to those bees in The Wickerman nor all the people who had the Face/Off surgery. Cage goes big for our viewing pleasure, living in that liminal space between reality and expression, forcing us to grapple with humanity’s deepest, darkest regions. However, when you think about it, eating live cockroaches is a bit much, isn’t it?
A young Nic Cage didn’t think so. Before Vampire’s Kiss was the primary subject of a thousand “Nicolas Cage’s wildest freak outs” YouTube compilations, it was a chance for Cage to go full method. Playing Peter Loew, a literary critic who believes he’s a vampire, Cage did wild things, such as forcefully reciting the alphabet and eating live cockroaches. An older, wiser Cage is a pickier eater, and he’s come to regret roach munching for cinema. “I’ll never do that again,” Cage told Yahoo Entertainment. “I’m sorry I did it at all.”
This is a far cry from Cage’s previous stance on the delicacy. In the commentary for the Vampire’s Kiss DVD, Cage elaborated on eating cockroaches for the film. “I saw it as a business decision because when people see the cockroach go in my mouth, [they] really react,” he said. However, as some kind of twisted joke, Vampire’s Kiss director Robert Bierman made him do a second take, even though, as Yahoo notes, “Cage suspects he intended to use the first take.”
“I ate [roaches] twice because the director did it as a prank,” he says.
Today, Cage still sees eating roaches as a way to “solve world starvation” because the bugs are “high protein, no fat, excellent nutrients, abundance. They’re everywhere! But nope — not gonna happen,” he tells Yahoo. It’s a shame that Cage won’t go back to eating roaches even though it would save the world. Sad, really.
This is not the first time that Cage has expressed regret for eating a cockroach, though. Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning in 2014, Cage said that the delicacy was his idea because he was trying to “get on the map.”
“I started at 15 and was trying to make a big noise, like punk rock, and say, look at me. I’m here, you know, and I want you to remember me,” he said. “I heard stories about Ozzy Osbourne, and I thought, wow, that’s wild[…]When I did Vampire’s Kiss, it was my idea. The director and I were knocking heads a little bit, so he made me do it twice, but I can tell you, it is the most disgusting, horrible experience I have of any experience on a movie set.”
The stunt certainly worked, and the film remains one of Cage’s personal favorite performances—though he told CBS that he did receive a “few phone calls” from “the animal rights people on set” about the stunt. Nevertheless, we’re still talking about how gross it was when Nicolas Cage ate a cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss. Pure cinema can never be truly forgotten. To paraphrase the maestro himself, Federico Fellini: we are constructed in memory; we are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age, maturity, and eating cockroaches to freak out squares.
15 Comments
You could get Circus Peanuts and food color them black/ brown. Which would be worse for you?
“Cage goes big for our viewing pleasure, living in that liminal space between reality and expression, forcing us to grapple with humanity’s deepest, darkest regions.” Witht the exceptions of Leaving Las Vegas, Time To Kill and Joe (which was rough watching), I don’t see that aesthetic in operation. In many cases he’s just being incredibly extra, not deeply profound.
“The stunt certainly worked, and the film remains one of Cage’s personal favorite performances—though he told CBS that he did receive a “few phone calls” from “the animal rights people on set” about the stunt.” I’m largely sympathetic to the “animal rights people,” our factory farm system is an atrocity, and we only think it’s okay because most people don’t have to see it or engage with it at any point before the end product, but you know what, if you want to eat a cockroach or two, go nuts.
not as much as the cockroaches.
Meanwhile, Gillian Anderson is glad and would do it again.
In many cultures eating bugs (although typically cooked and not alive) is a normal thing and not a stunt. It’s not really all that weird. I mean western cultures like to eat crustaceans like shrimp and lobsters, and those are not that far away from bugs.
Apparently the crew had a candy cricket ready to go, but she just decided to go for it and put the real one in her mouth (but faked the chewing and swallowing). For some reason, crickets seem to be one of the most “approved” insects for human consumption in the western world, although I remember chocolate covered ants being a thing many years ago.Cockroaches have long been associated with filth and disease. I think I’d have a hard time overcoming that even if I was assured that it was fresh from the farm. (Yes, industrial cockroach forms exist.)
That last point really gets to the heart of the matter. The whole thing is psychological construct, two big mental boxes of “food” and “not food” that your cultural environment has been reinforcing since birth. It’s objectively weirder that we eat iceberg lettuce or diet soda, things that your body doesn’t really do anything useful with, but you’ve never seen worm salad on a menu, so…
Yeah, I’ve actually had several different prepared insects… but roaches? I don’t know.Not to get TMI, but when you kill one it’s almost like it’s filled with some nasty white pudding. I just do not want to know what that tastes like lol
[SPOILER]…Randomly, a guest on a podcast I was listening to today said it tastes like blue cheese.
The world would be a much better place if we instituted the “travel draft” where every teen was forced to pick a spot in a drastically different culture to live on for a year just to bust up that impression of “normal” before ones worldviews become too calcified. (That we’d be forced to care about the economic health of those places, because our kids would be going to live there, would be a nice side benefit.)Also everyone should be forced to get hooked on drugs and then magically cured (which doesn’t exist, this is just a thought exercise) because I firmly believe we’d then have drug policies that work much much much better and treat addictions as the medical problems they (primarily) are.We could call the program that mandated these two experiences the Empathy Draft.Also, I agree with you. Shrimp are freakin’ bugs, people.
My wife once ordered the bug tacos. This is a real thing. I tried a bite. Didn’t taste bad, but you can see the little bug legs. Again, this is a real thing. In America.
jadwal bola
Nicolas Cage isn’t one to apologize for a Gonzo performance.
So he doesn’t regret the love scene with a chicken?
-_- … Yeah, I don’t think that’s what the Colonel meant by “Finger-lickin’ Good”.