In the last few years several interesting phenomena associated to the interaction between massive black holes and fundamental bosonic fields have been discovered. I present a selection of them, including superradiance instabilities of spin-0, spin-1 and spin-2 fields, floating orbits in extreme-mass ratio inspirals and black-hole spontaneous scalarization. The theoretical potential of these effects
as almost-model-independent smoking guns for exotic particles and modified gravity, as well as their limitations in realistic astrophysical scenarios, are discussed.
