“I look back and say, ‘What was I thinking?’”

Yes, that was a real bird in Michelle Pfeiffer's mouth. 

It sounds like a bizarre movie myth, but the infamous Batman Returns scene was completely real. In just one take, Pfeiffer takes the bird from its cage, places it in her mouth, and seconds later opens her lips to let it fly free.

"I look back and say, 'What was I thinking? I could've gotten a disease or something from having a live bird in my mouth,'" Pfeiffer recalled. "I think Tim likes to torture me a bit, it's like a little brother [or] brat kind of thing."

Nicolas Cage took things to a new level when filming the 1988 film Vampire’s Kiss. 

Cage, who was cast as the character Peter Loew, was initially supposed to eat a raw egg – but decided to switch things up a bit, twice. 

“I saw it as a business decision because when people see the cockroach go in my mouth, it's like the bus blowing up in Speed, people really react, and it's like worth $2 million in special effects and all I do is eat a bug. So it's good business,” he shared at the time. 

Years later during a press run for Renfield, Cage confirmed it’s something he’d (understandably) never do again.

The scene where Daenerys eats the horse's heart may have been shocking for viewers, but also for Emilia Clarke herself, whose disgusted face was very real. While she wasn't eating a real heart, she was eating a gummy bear-like pasta and fake blood concoction that tasted like bleach. 

The actor reportedly ate 28 hearts' worth of the mixture and would throw up at points between takes.

The Great Hall scenes in Harry Potter made kids across the world drool with envy, but they were actually not so fun to shoot. 

As the scenes took several days to film, the actors were only allowed to eat the food during the first day of shooting. This was because the same dishes had been sitting on set for an extended period. 

According to actor Warwick Davis, who played Flitwick, by "the fourth day, you could smell the Great Hall before you got in it. The food was the same food, and it had quite an 'amazing' smell."

The iconic Christmas movie was a lot of fun to watch, but for Will Ferrell, it wasn't so joyous to film, largely because of the amount of sugary foods he had to eat. 

He described one scene in particular as "tough" to film, with his character, Buddy, eating pasta laden with sugary sweets. 

“I ingested a lot of sugar in this movie, and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I constantly stayed up. But anything for the movie, I’m there. If it takes eating a lot of maple syrup, then I will — if that’s what the job calls for," he shared. 

Star Wars fans will recognise the blue milky drink that Mark Hamill was drinking during the movies, but the actual stuff was sickening. 

“Honestly though: the warm, oily, sickly-sweet milk dyed blue from the movie was gag-inducing," he shared. 

This scene was disturbing enough to film – but actor JoBeth Williams only discovered the true horror of it years later.

In the scene, Williams’ character falls into an excavated swimming pool during a torrential downpour. As the pool fills with water, skeletons begin to rise from the murky depths around her.

As if that wasn’t unsettling enough, the actor later learned that the skeletons weren’t just props; they were real human skeletons. Apparently, production used them because they were cheaper to source than convincing replicas.

Williams later said she was glad she didn’t know at the time, but finding out years later that she had been surrounded by actual human remains made the already chilling scene even more shocking.

Actor Tom Guiry revealed that filming the carnival scene was actually a pretty miserable experience. For starters, the actors had to repeatedly ride the carnival attraction – and after enough takes, it started to take its toll.

"We had to go on that ride about 15 times, and I think me, Ham, and Chauncey all threw up a few times. At first, it was like, ‘This isn’t so bad.’ But by the fifteenth go-round, it was like, ‘This is getting a little uhhhh,'” he shared.

But the ride wasn’t the only unpleasant part of filming. The fake chewing tobacco the young actors had to use for the scene was apparently just as disgusting as the real thing.

Guiry explained exactly what was in the fake dip: "Liquorice and bacon bits, I think some of us were stupid enough to swallow it."

The scene itself wasn’t necessarily disgusting to film – it was what happened to Zoey Deutch during the shoot that made it memorable.

In the scene, Deutch and Glen Powell’s characters are eating pizza while cuddling up together. But to get the shots they needed, Deutch had to keep eating take after take – eventually consuming four full large pizzas.

On the experience, she said: "I threw up violently halfway through the scene. And then I had to proceed to be very close to Glen Powell, who now, I think, looks at me in a very different light."

Thankfully for her, the scene didn't put her off pizzas, though.

The scene where Sam Tarly removes Jorah Mormont’s greyscale in Game of Thrones was a stomach-churning moment to watch.

Watching Sam carefully peel away the infected skin, revealing layers of scabs and pus underneath, was enough to make even the strongest viewers feel queasy. And while the gruesome effects were created with prosthetics, filming the scene was still far from pleasant.

John Bradley, who played Sam, opened up about shooting the scene and admitted that the realism of the effects made it difficult to ignore.

"It looks disgusting even when you know it’s latex and that there’s a man nearby with a bucket filled with creamy gunk. It looks so disgusting. You look down, and you genuinely believe in what it is… you can imagine that it’s pretty grim," he shared.

Margot Robbie described the scene where Harley Quinn goes into the big vat of gooey liquid as one of the "most unpleasant things" she's ever done in her entire life.  

"It was like this gluggy paint stuff that was so far in my ears and up my nose, and I was choking on it underwater, and I couldn't breathe, and I tried to open my eyes, and it would glaze over my eyeballs, and I could only see white. It was horrible," she explained. 

Playing frontiersman Hugh Glass, Leonardo DiCaprio pushed himself through a series of gruelling challenges, from wading through freezing rivers to sleeping inside animal carcasses to capture the harsh reality of the character’s survival.

One of the most infamous moments came when Leo ate a real raw bison liver on camera – a scene that was kept in the final cut because of how intense it looked. 

Describing the experience, he said: “The bad part is the membrane around it... It’s like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth.” DiCaprio was actually offered a gelatine replica instead, but after seeing it on the day, he decided against it because it "didn't look real," and opted for the real thing.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu reportedly had some concerns about the decision, worrying that his lead actor could become ill. While DiCaprio did get sick during production, thankfully, it wasn’t because of the raw bison liver.