Nicolas Cage is well-known for his strange antics, and he's pulled a variety of stunts to get in character over the years. For his film Birdy, he had four teeth pulled out in order to add effect to his character's appearance, and he wore the character's facial bandages for five weeks straight on and off set. "I could have taken those bandages off, but I didn't. I left them on for five weeks," he told The New York Times in 1984. "I slept in them. I'd wake myself up in the middle of the night and say, 'Don't sleep on that side; that's the side that was hurt.'

Cage has continued his shenanigans in the decades that followed that performance. In general, he follows a method called "nouveau-shamanic,," a made-up acting technique that he described as "trying to augment your imagination to get to the performance without feeling like you're faking it." He elaborated that nouveau shamanic-technique cannot be taught, but must be discovered.