Nicolas Cage, a fearless actor who won Jim Carrey's admiration for his "elephant balls," famously ate a live cockroach in Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss. Asked to consume a raw egg, Cage suggested that a cockroach would be better. He ate one -- whereupon Bierman promptly called for another take.

["To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal," Cage once remarked, "to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new... There's a fine line between the method actor and the schizophrenic." Cage's passion for method acting reached its peak during the production of The Cotton Club when, searching for the sense of rage needed to portray a brutal gangster, he smashed a street-vendor's remote-control car.]

[Cage got his big break through his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola... reading lines during the auditions for Rumble Fish.Cage so impressed his uncle that he soon landed a role in the film.]