Why Nicolas Cage had hot yoghurt poured over him on set
Nobody approaches the profession of acting quite like Nicolas Cage, which is an understatement considering the volume of tales detailing the myriad of bizarre methods he’s adopted in order to get into character.
It’s spawned a thousand memes along the way, but there’s no performance that better encapsulates everything Cage is about than Vampire’s Kiss. Arguably the definitive example of his personally-curated style, the star went above and beyond in order to try and redefine what acting meant to him.
Cage heads up the ensemble as Peter Loew, a materialistic literary agent who appears to be driven by nothing but the notion of wealth and hedonism. However, an encounter with Jennifer Beals’ Rachel results in a bite on the neck, making him increasingly certain that he’s in the midst of being transformed into a vampire.
As well as giving rise to the “You don’t say?” meme, Vampire’s Kiss also famously features Cage eating a live cockroach. Why? Well, according to director Robert Bierman, it was because the insects are the thing that frightened him more than anything else. “‘The thing I hate most in the world are cockroaches. So let me eat a cockroach’,” the filmmaker recalled to The Ringer. “He wanted to eat the most frightening thing for him”.
Still, his exacting standards meant that he had to at least appear as though he was suitably titillated for their sex scene, which led to some unusual preparations. “To get turned on, Nic asked to have hot yoghurt poured over his toes while he was doing a love scene with Jennifer,” Shulman continued. “If you look at the shot, you don’t see his feet”.
Beals wasn’t enough to put Cage in the mood for their steamy encounter in Vampire’s Kiss, but for reasons that only he’d be able to answer, having the bacterial fermentation of milk heated up to well beyond the recommended temperature and then having it slathered all over his feet did the job.
It’s a questionable method of simulating the act of becoming erotically charged, and yet somehow it’s so bizarre that it’s also entirely on-brand for someone like Cage, who built his reputation on doing things that nobody else would even consider doing as a means of giving the best possible performance. Even without that knowledge, if asked to name any actor who had hot yoghurt poured over their toes before a sex scene, most people would probably name Cage anyway.
