Some three and a half decades ago, Nicholas Cage made a profoundly strange little movie called Vampire’s Kiss. He played a very ‘80s Manhattan literary agent who starts to think, probably foolishly, that he’s a vampire. It is bananas. Maybe the wildest part is this: He eats a real cockroach. Cage really did that. Jump to the present day, and one of his costars — and someone with almost the same first name — is following in his footsteps, sort of.
In a new, not-yet-online interview with Total Film (as caught by /Film), Nicholas Hoult talks about Renfield, the forthcoming Dracula riff in which he plays the titular familiar to Cage’s Count. Apparently Renfield does some bug-eating, mostly in a scene where he’s trying to “top up” his powers before a big fight. So Hoult decided to do go Faux-Method and eat some real bugs, too. But they weren’t just critters he found scurrying about set. And they didn’t only taste of bug:
“I think they just ordered them from Amazon or wherever. The crickets came in different flavors. Some of them were barbecue, some were salt and vinegar. Honestly, once you get over the idea of what it is you’re eating, they weren’t that bad. And I ate a lot. There was only one that I didn’t like — it was a potato bug, and that one did taste… buggy.”
Not that all of Hoult’s on-set diet was actual bugs. Some of the “cockroaches” were actually fake ones, made of chocolate, which Hoult deemed “suitably chewy and sticky in the teeth, but delicious.”
Anyway, bug-eating isn’t that weird! Survival guides advise eating bugs if you’re lost in the wild. They’re rich in protein. There’s even a documentary about the joy of eating insects, arguing that they may be a good source of food in a world being overrun by the effects of climate change. In the meantime, you can, like the makers of Renfield, order crickets on Amazon, or anywhere else that delivers food.
(Via Total Film and /Film)