Nick de Semlyen

“Cannon Films […] already had a Vietnam script for its own kicking around. Impressed by Norris in a way they had not been by Van Damme, Golan and Globus signed him up to a five-film contract and greenlit both of the war pictures, to be released as Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2.

The first was set during the conflict itself, with Norris’s character, American POW Jim Braddock, tormented by his Vietnamese captors. One torture scene called for Braddock to be hung upside down from a tree, a sack placed over his head, and a ravenous rat placed inside it. After a violent tussle, it would end with the reveal that Braddock has bitten the creature to death, rather than vice versa. “They were getting ready to do this scene, and I see all these mountain rats in cages,” remembers Norris. “I say, ‘Where’s the fake rat?’ No one says anything. So I say to the director, ‘How are you going to do this scene?’ And he says, ‘I haven´t really thought about it that much.’”

Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth (the American Humane Association had clearly not been invited on set). But he didn’t see it as a choice at all. He ordered the animal killed, bit into its bulbous, furry corpse, and was hoisted up for the scene, shaking to simulate a struggle while fake blood poured down the rope.

“The blood is coming down into my mouth, mixed with the saliva of the rat. I’m shaking all over, and finally I’m about to throw up,” Norris says, shuddering. “All I can taste is this rat in my mouth and I’m thinking I’ve got the bubonic plague from doing this with a mountain rat. But the scene was good.”



Norris’s wife, Dianne, refused to kiss him for a week.”
― Nick de Semlyen, The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage