The iconic slap scene
An iconic scene in the film plays out after Cammareri and Castorini’s characters spend the evening together. Castorini wakes up to find she had betrayed her fiancé with his brother and tells Cammareri that they will both forget the night had happened and take their secret to their graves.
Cammareri says he cannot do that because he has fallen in love with Castorini, to which she gives him two firm slaps across the face and issues the famous line: “Snap out of it!”
Fans have slapped Cage in the face
Cage has recalled that, on more than one occasion, fans of the film have decided to play out the scene with him. “For the longest time, back from Moonstruck, I would walk to the airport and people just had a habit of saying, ‘Snap out of it!’ from Moonstruck — the Cher ‘snap out of it’ [line] — and I did get slapped a few times,” he explained.
The actor was never too upset whenever it happened, because he always saw it as “part of the job.” Why in the world would fans of Cage go on to slap him in the face when meeting him? He explained, “I think maybe [they think] I’ll cast them in something. Who knows?”
Cage didn’t even want to do ‘Moonstruck’
Cage didn’t want to take part in Moonstruck. He only took the role of Cammareri because he’d made a deal with his agent. Instead of Moonstruck, Cage wanted to free his schedule for a role in the 1988 film, Vampire’s Kiss.
“I made that movie on a deal with my then-agent Ed Limato. I was desperately trying to get him to say yes to me doing Vampire’s Kiss. He said: ‘No, you’re not going to wear those stupid plastic things. I want you to look handsome! Do Moonstruck!’,” Cage said. The two agreed that if he did Moonstruck, he could do Vampire’s Kiss as well.
Fans have Cage’s agent to thank for his role in Moonstruck, and looking back now, even Cage is thankful. “The truth is, I love Moonstruck,” Cage explained. “Now that I’m older, I see the value in [it]. I haven’t seen Moonstruck in a million years, but I think it’s powerfully romantic, and I love all the performances.”
This is definitely not the only strange thing that’s happened to Cage
Cage’s famously eccentric personality, as well as the oddball roles he’s taken during his acting career, have led to some strange things happening in his life. Unsurprisingly, being slapped in the face by fans is not the first time Cage has been subject to bizarre behavior from fans.
In an interview with Parade in 2009, Cage revealed that he had been pursued by a fan while shooting Scorsese’s 1999 film, Bringing Out the Dead. “I guess it would fall into the stalker category more or less,” he said. “I was being stalked by a mime—silent, but maybe deadly.”
“Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of Bringing Out the Dead and start doing strange things… I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action, and I haven’t seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling,” Cage explained. Let’s hope his future fan encounters are a little less unnerving than these ones!
