Nicolas Cage arrived on set without eating anything that day.
It was 2007, and the actor had been training for months, between four and five hours a day, to become Johnny Blaze, the protagonist of Ghost Rider. Before the scene in front of the mirror, which would show his bare torso, he avoided all food and allowed himself only candy corn to push the definition of his veins and muscles to the limit. He ended up so exhausted that he later admitted he couldn’t remember clearly what he said in front of the cameras.
When the film premiered, the audience didn’t see sacrifice: they saw a computer. Thousands of people swore that those abs were CGI, and the theory became accepted as fact for fifteen years. Cage kept his frustration to himself until 2022, when on GQ’s “Actually Me” series he responded directly: “My abs were real, and that’s why I’ll never train that hard again. Nobody wanted to believe they were real; everyone preferred to think it was CGI. And if they weren’t going to believe me, what’s the point?”
Interestingly, there were digital effects in the film: the flaming skull and a tattoo they erased from his arm. But his body, the one that cost him months of going hungry, was entirely his own. 🔥