Nicolas Cage may simultaneously be the most hated and loved actor in Hollywood. While there is a subreddit dedicated to him (OneTrueGod), there are a number of memes of him that seem to constantly be circling the internet. The man himself, however, is an extremely fascinating guy. Here are 30 shocking facts about Nicolas Cage. Enjoy!

1/30. Nicolas Cage is notorious for his profligate spending, blowing huge sums on castles, yachts, a jet and a T-rex skull. So when it came time for him to get a pet for his house, no dog or cat would do. Instead, the actor dropped a bundle on an octopus, telling the press that he needed it to help him with his acting.



2/30. He has a number of relatives in the film industry, including iconic director Francis Ford Coppola. To stand out from his famous relatives, he decided to change his last name from Coppola to Cage, inspired by the African-American comic book superhero Luke Cage.

3/30. He was once woken up by a naked homeless man standing over him eating a fudgesicle and wearing a leather jacket. Apparently the man had broken into his house, stolen the ice cream from the kitchen, and wandered into the bedroom before raiding the closet, picking out a jacket, and waking Cage and his wife. After Cage talked him out of his house the man was arrested, but Cage decided not to press charges.

4/30. Cage once drove 180 mph on the freeway: Cage likes to drive fast, if not necessarily angry. "Well, Amber [Heard] is still raising her eyebrow at me because I said that I've been 180 miles per hour on the 405 freeway on a motorcycle and she doesn't believe me but it's a true story. I did it coming home from work at 3 in the morning on another movie I made about cars called Gone in 60 Seconds. I bought a Yamaha-1 and I was doing 180 miles per hour home on the 405 and that's really, really crazy but I did it."



5/30. He will be buried in a pyramid. As a celebrity, you need to think about whats going to happen after you die. You need to keep your corpse secure from grave-robbers and crazed fans, and Nicolas Cage is set in that department. Hes got a nine foot tall stone pyramid in one of New Orleans most famous cemeteries that his body will be interred within.

6/30. He once ate 3 cockroaches while filming a scene for the movie Vampires Kiss.

7/30. Cage owns a Lamborghini that used to belong to Prince Ali-Reza Pahlavi, the former prince of Iran.

8/30. He proposed to Patricia Arquette on the day he met her in the early 1980s. Arquette thought he was a bit strange but played along with his antics by creating a list of things Cage would have to fulfill to win her. When he started to work his way through the list, Arquette got scared and avoided him. They met again many years later and later went on to marry.

9/30. Nicolas Cage went to the same high school as Angelina Jolie, Michael Klesic, Lenny Kravitz, David Schwimmer, Rob Reiner and Betty White, to name a few.

10/30. When Late Show host David Letterman asked Cage whether he drank beer in high school in 2010, the movie star said one time he and his cat devoured a bag of mushrooms that had been in his refrigerator.

11/30. Cage eats animals based on how they have sex. He refuses to eat them unless they are dignified while mating.

12/30. He met his first wife, Patricia Arquette, at a deli in Los Angeles. During their courtship, she asked him to bring her J.D. Salingers signature on something to prove that he really loved her (he did). They divorced in 2001.

13/30. In "Birdy" (1984), he played a ladies man who was severely wounded in Vietnam, and during production, he decided to get his teeth pulled in real life so that he could connect with some kind of physical pain.

14/30. Not just a strange guy, Nicolas Cage donated $1 million to Hurricane Katrina victims.

15/30. He has served as a UN Goodwill Ambassador for Global Justice since 2010, recently calling for greater efforts to help human trafficking victims in Nov. 2013.

16/30. He got a back tattoo of a lizard in a top hat and cane to claim my own body, adding, other cultures have initiations into manhood and thats what the tattoo was for me, he told reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994.

17/30. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by California State University, Fullerton and also spoke at the commencement.

18/30. Cage said he realized that all great movie stars, such as Spencer Tracy, had had recognizable voices, so he has changed and stylized his own voice to be distinctive.

19/30. When Cage was arrested in New Orleans and charged with alleged domestic violence against his wife, Alice, and disturbing the peace. The $11,000 needed to bail him out was posted by Duane 'Dog' Chapman, better known as "Dog the Bounty Hunter."

20/30. In an interview, he revealed that when he was four, Cage would have this recurring dream in which I was on the toilet and this giant blonde genie woman in a gold bikini would reach into the bathroom window like King Kong and pluck me off of the toilet seat and laugh at me.

21/30. Nicolas Cage and Michael Jackson were both married to the same woman: Lisa Marie Presley.

22/30. Cage and Presley met at a birthday party for rock guitarist Johnny Ramone, and the Ramones star was the best man at their wedding.

23/30. The directors of "The Croods" (2013) essentially waterboarded Cage when they were shooting a scene in which the actor had to scream into a large tank of water.

24/30. Actress Kathleen Turner, who acted with Cage in the movie "Peggy Sue Got Married" (1986), alleged in her 2008 memoir that he had been arrested for drunk-driving and had stolen a chihuahua. He sued her for libel, and she ended up apologizing, paying his legal fees, and making a donation to charity.

25/30. Nicolas Cage appreciates the finer things in life, like that time he spent more than $275,000 and outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a dinosaur skull.

26/30. After leaving a club in the country while promoting Ghost Rider, he got into a fight with his friend and ran through the streets yelling I thought we were brothers, man, and Ill die in the name of honor.

27/30. He developed his own acting method, and it's called Nouveau Shamanic: Cage formally studied acting for about six months and looked to thespians like Robert De Niro and then Laurence Olivier as models at various points in his career. But then: "By the time I got around to "Vampire's Kiss" and then "Bad Lieutenant" and now this movie, "Drive Angry" and then also "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance," I had realized that I'd developed my own style and process and school of acting which is called Nouveau Shamanic. That's the new style of acting and at some point I'll have to write a book."

28/30. Cage was once stalked by a mime. Cage said it would appear on his movie sets and followed him around everywhere.

29/30. He still loves reptiles, telling Vanity Fair in Sep. 2013 that he asked to hold a venomous snake to calm his nerves on the set of the movie "Joe" (2013).



30/30. Mr. Cage owned one of the most expensive comics ever published: a pristine copy of Action Comics #1, sold at auction for over $2 million. And if that wasn't enough, he named his kid Kal-El.



Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4