10 Bizarre Ways Famous Actors Got Into Character For Movie Roles

9. Nicolas Cage Painted His Face Like Baron Samedi & Carried Egyptian Relics - Ghost Rider

One of the least surprising sentences in the English language is "Nicolas Cage did some weird sh*t," because that's the essence of Nicolas Cage and everything he stands for. Still, even for the Cagemeister, the stuff he did in order to get into character on the set of the Ghost Rider films is really, really strange - mostly because there's zero context involved. It's probably better if you hear it straight from the horse's mouth:

"I would paint my face with black and white make-up to look like a Afro-Caribbean icon called Baron Samedi. He is a spirit of death but he loves children; he's very lustful, so he's a conflict in forces."

Ghost Rider is a Marvel superhero film about a biker named Johnny Blaze. At no point in the narrative is there any suggestion or link made to the "icon" Baron Samedi. Then there's the Egyptian relics, which are - for lack of a better word - entirely baffling in every way. Cage would apparently "sew in ancient, thousands-of-years-old Egyptian relics" in order "to gather energies together and shock imagination into believing that was augmented in some way by them, or in contact with ancient ghosts." Hell of a production that must've been to work on, huh?