10 More Actors Who Got High To Shoot Their Movies

7. Nicolas Cage - Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

For all of the poor films he's made, when Nic Cage goes method, he doesn't pull his punches, as fans found when he made Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and actually took cocaine as part of his preparation.

It wasn't quite illegal, though, as Cage was prescribed the drug in Australia for blocked sinuses:

“The strangest thing of all is that in Australia, they still use cocaine to clear your sinuses and it’s a true story — I had a massive sinus infection and I was trying to understand or recall something from a hundred years in my past and I couldn’t get it — and they sent me to the doctor who did this cocaine solution thing and put it in my nose."

That "doctor" needs checking out. Anyway, Cage revealed that the cocaine actually helped him perform as the drug addict lead, as he took notes while high

“I came out and just started taking notes and I noticed my mouth was getting really dry and I was feeling very invincible and I started improvising the scenes and coming up with ideas and I was swallowing a lot so then I was graphing it in the script — this is coke so this is what he’s doing here, there’s going to be a lot of swallowing, a lot of lip smacking."

It was so convincing that Werner Herzog apparently thought he was really taking cocaine on set.