A Sunday evening in 2018: Kevin Smith was sweating profusely. The director had been feeling nauseous, too, but he’d put that down to the fact he was in the middle of filming two stand-up sets for a special. And then, in his dressing room at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California, he collapsed on the floor and vomited all over the tiles. At Glendale Memorial Hospital, Smith learnt he’d suffered a massive heart attack known as the “widow-maker”. Smith’s doctor put his chances of survival at 17 per cent. (The special, by the way, was titled Silent But Deadly.) “I know I’m lucky,” says the 52-year-old director, down the line from Chicago. “For the last five years I’ve been meeting people who’ll say: ‘Oh, my brother had your widow-maker.’ ‘How’s he doing?’ ‘He’s dead.’ It really just comes down to chance.”

In fact, as heart attacks go, Smith’s didn’t turn out so bad. “They got me in and out of the hospital in 32 hours, and I was never in pain,” he recalls. There can be common symptoms, such as a shooting pain in the left arm, but he never experienced them. “I had it easy as hell, man, believe me.” Nevertheless, the experience forced him to contemplate his mortality in the most immediate terms. He became vegan, started exercising more and lost a lot of weight. He also found a renewed desire to make Clerks III, a second sequel to his 1994 breakthrough Clerks, the black-and-white slacker masterpiece. (He’d already made bigger-budget follow-up, Clerks II, in 2006). “Post-heart attack, I was like, ‘I’m living on borrowed time now,’” says Smith. “I’d better act accordingly, so if there’s some dream of mine that I’m trying to accomplish I better get moving. Clerks III was a dream.”

Smith had been trying to get a version of Clerks III made for several years, but decided to completely rewrite the script to focus on his heart attack. “It was a movie that was obsessed with death, written by somebody who hadn’t tasted it yet,” he says. “Now that you’ve tasted the immortal you have something to say, motherfucker.” Originally, the story had taken place entirely in the parking lot of a movie theatre while the characters waited to see Ranger Danger And The Danger Rangers. “It was complete artifice,” says Smith. “It was Waiting for Godot, not Clerks III.”

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Nicole Kidman tilts her head back, glances towards the camera and lowers a still-wriggling pale blue hornworm into her wide open mouth. Next she chows down on a teeming mound of mealworms, munches on crickets, and finishes off with a hearty plate of fried grasshoppers. This is not a long-lost outtake from I’m a Celebrity… if it were directed by Stanley Kubrick, but a YouTube video published by Vanity Fair in 2018. It’s one of a series of clips featuring stars showing off their “secret talents”. You’ve got Oprah cleaning up dog mess; Michael B Jordan doing his ironing. As for Kidman, daintily snacking on what she calls “micro-livestock” with chopsticks, her talent is a bit more arresting. “Two billion people in the world eat bugs,” she beams. “And I’m one of them!”

Where the casual observer may merely see a foodie actor keen to show off her adventurous palate, various conspiracy-minded corners of the internet have come to the conclusion that something more nefarious is afoot. To them, the two-minute video is nothing less than proof of a global campaign by shadowy elites to convince us that we should be happy subsisting on creepy-crawlies. The rich and powerful, meanwhile, will hoard haute cuisine for themselves. Earlier this year, one YouTube commenter wrote of Kidman: “Her dark witch laugh sent cold chills over me… that’s what the elite want us to eat: bugs [while] they dine on steak and every exquisite meal out there.” Another suggested there were powers greater than merely the editors of Vanity Fair behind the clip. “Well done Nicole!!!” they wrote. “You have secured your position as Bug Ambassador to the WEF!”

The WEF is the World Economic Forum, a popular bogeyman for far-right groups like QAnon, which posits that a “deep state” of wealthy, powerful people dine on babies while pulling the levers that control the world. “Any global institution is easy to paint as part of a conspiracy,” says journalist Nicky Woolf, who spent a year reporting on Q and its followers for the podcast Finding Q. “The World Economic Forum and the World Bank, because of their branding as much as anything, are often portrayed as part of a ‘one world government’.”

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