If you asked anyone to rank the top 10 craziest Nicolas Cage performances, the infamous “not the bees!” moment in 2006’s remake of The Wicker Man would probably land somewhere near the top.
Even two decades later, the scene endures as a meme-able monument to what happens when you let Cage out of…well, the cage.
And to be fair, the actor is in on the joke. Despite the fact that Wicker Man technically falls under the horror genre, Edward Malus’s desperate pleas not to be subjected to a swarm of stinging insects were never meant to be taken seriously.
Nicolas Cage Explains “Not the Bees!” Moment in 2006’s The Wicker Man
“I know people had fun with that even if they thought the comedy was not intentional,” Cage told IndieWire in 2022. “I’m going on record right now: That is not a fact. [writer/director] Neil [LaBute] and I both knew how funny it was.”
“It probably would’ve been more clear how funny it was if [producer] Avi Lerner let me have the handlebar mustache that I wanted to wear and be burned in the bear suit,” the Oscar winner continued. “That would’ve been so horrifying, but they didn’t go for that because all the comedy would’ve emerged from this horror.”
Cage, who is a walking encyclopedia of cinema history, had hoped to pay homage to the scene in Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death where a character (Patrick Magee) is tricked into wearing a monkey suit, hung from the ceiling and set on fire.
“What began as absurd and comical became horrifying because insult was added to injury,” Cage reflected to The New York Times in 2019. “In The Wicker Man, I was trying to get this whole trajectory to go along with the absurdity by having them light me on fire in the bear suit. That really would have been horrific.”
Like Cage, LaBute defended Wicker Man a 2013 interview with Vulture, explaining that it “was supposed to be way out there.”
“It’s one of those things where you take a swing at the fence and go, ‘Here’s something interesting and crazy,'” LaBute said. “You can’t look at that without knowing you’re going on an adventure, and wondering, ‘Is this gonna work or not?’ And I had a great time making it, I would work on it again in a heartbeat. I’d work with Nic again in a heartbeat.”
