Like so many of us, Nicolas Cage regrets eating live cockroaches

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.