The Extremely R-Rated Birthday Cake Scene No One Will Ever Forget

You can watch the best Steven Seagal movie on Netflix right now.

By Rick Gonzales
| Published 11 seconds ago

Of all the action movies Steven Seagal has made, his highest-rated is Under Siege. This Seagal flick, sometimes referred to as Die Hard on the seas, and it earns the title.

Under Siege is a stripped-down action setup executed with ruthless efficiency: when a group of mercenaries led by Tommy Lee Jones and a traitorous officer played by Gary Busey hijack the USS Missouri to seize its nuclear arsenal, they overlook one critical detail: a seemingly unremarkable ship’s cook who’s actually a former Navy SEAL named Casey Ryback, played by Steven Seagal.

As the crew is locked down and the clock ticks toward catastrophe, Ryback wages a one-man war through the battleship’s corridors, dismantling the takeover piece by piece with brutal precision, aided by a reluctant civilian ally, until the ship, and its weapons, are back under control.

The Infamous Under Siege Birthday Cake Scene

Erika Eleniak plays Jordan Tate in the film, a former Playboy model turned reluctant hostage aboard a hijacked battleship. Her infamous birthday cake scene is calculated sex appeal dropped right in the middle of a muscle-bound action movie to jolt the audience awake.

She arrives on the ship to perform at a party. When the terrorists take over, she’s there in the ship’s ballroom, waiting to hop out of the cake, and has no idea what’s going on. Then Steven Segal walks in, she thinks it’s party time, and the result is one of the most iconic surprises in movie history.

According to Eleniak in a YouTube Interview, “That was never supposed to be a topless scene.” It was something that escalated over the course of production, leading up to the moment.

Erika Eleniak Added The Jacket To Cover Up

She now says of the scene, “I was definitely not OK with it, which is why I ended up wearing a jacket in it, and ended up doing more of a flash kind of situation than being totally topless.”

Eleniak explains, “I was very, very young, and I think now today if that conversation had sprung up on me like that, I think I would have handled it very differently. Everybody knew that I was nervous about it; in fact, Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey sent me flowers.”

That doesn’t mean Erika regrets doing it or has any negative feelings about it now. She says, “It’s all good. It’s all good.”

Eleniak is paired with Steven Segal for the rest of the movie, as the two make their way through the ship. It was a career-making turn for the actress, who until then had done only television. She’s worked steadily in film and television ever since.