The Untold Truth Of Kevin Bacon

Kevin Bacon occupies a unique place in pop culture. An acclaimed and prolific film and TV actor who's been working regularly since the late '70s, Bacon was determined not to go the way of other teenage heartthrobs. So he reinvented his career in the early '90s, and as a result, wound up in some of the most celebrated films of the last few decades. 

But as impressive as creating a successful acting career is all on its own, it isn't just his credits that make Kevin Bacon such an interesting figure. He's fearless in his choice of roles, often embracing parts that other high-profile actors wouldn't go near. He also refuses to be pinned down to a single creative pursuit, and has been a professional musician since the mid-'90s. He's the idol of star-spanning superheroes, he was the victim of one of the century's most reviled crooks, and perhaps most famously (and through no effort on his part), his career has turned into a famous party game. This is the untold truth of Kevin Bacon, Hollywood's most surprising star.

In the mid-'80s, Kevin Bacon looked to be on track to become one of Hollywood's next leading men. But that isn't what happened. Speaking to NME in October 2020, Bacon said he was at "the top of the mountain in Hollywood with Footloose," but that after the movie, he "was kind of sliding back down the other side." What followed was a string of leading roles, but largely in flops like 1986's Quicksilver and the 1991 romantic comedy He Said, She Said. Battered by these disappointments, Bacon decided it was time to look at his career differently.

Rather than being a leading man, Bacon focused on becoming a great character actor. Speaking to The Guardian in 2017, Bacon said, "When I made the choice not to look for things where my name was above the title, that started a whole new thing for me." Roles that followed included Jack Ross, the prosecutor facing off against Tom Cruise in 1992's A Few Good Men, astronaut Jack Swigert in 1995's Apollo 13, and most shockingly to many of Bacon's contemporaries, a sex worker in 1991's JFK.

"People said, 'Wow, I never thought I'd see you do that!'" Bacon told NME. "Of course, for me and for the people that actually knew me it was not a surprise ... I've been doing, you know, crazy offbeat characters for a really long time. But to the general Hollywood industry, that was a new thing."

At this point, big name actors attempting to use their Hollywood clout to sell records is a cliche. Actors like Lindsay Lohan and Corey Feldman famously embarked on musical careers, which ended up serving mainly as fuel for punchlines and memes. But The Bacon Brothers are something altogether different. 

Kevin Bacon and his older brother Michael,  an Emmy-winning musical composer, have released 10 albums as The Bacon Brothers, including 2020's The Way We Love. While they officially formed in 1995, the pair say they have been playing together since they were children, writing on their website, "We've been doing this for several decades if you go back to when we first had instruments in our hands. We were raised in a family that appreciated everything that was artistic." Among their influences they name The Beatles, Motown, Led Zeppelin, the singer-songwriters of the '70s, and "an array of archetypical folkies."

Still, Kevin Bacon doesn't have any illusions about why a lot of people show up to Bacon Brothers concerts. "Sometimes they want to see what I look like in person," he told The Guardian, "and you just hope they leave going, 'The band was good.'" Apparently, the Bacon family's musical talents aren't limited to Kevin and Michael: Kevin's son Travis is also a musician, performing as a guitarist for the black metal band Black Anvil.

There's a really good chance you haven't seen one of Kevin Bacon's best films. Released in 2004, The Woodsman features what Today called Bacon's "career performance" – yet plenty of people were amazed the actor would go anywhere near the role in question. In the film, Bacon plays Walter, a pedophile who's just returned from prison and is trying to control his urges. 

 According to Bacon, even some of the people making the film were surprised he was willing to take the role. As he recalled, The Woodsman's producer Lee Daniels asked him, "'Why would you want to do a movie where you play a child molester? That's like the kiss of death for actors!'" Bacon himself admitted in a 2005 interview with Roger Ebert that he was looking for the exact opposite kind of role. "I wanted to do something more mainstream," Bacon insisted. "I wanted to do something where I actually got paid, you know. I was just coming off of Mystic River and I didn't want to do anything dark." But Nicole Kassell's screenplay for The Woodsman was too compelling. "I felt the movie chose me, in a way," Bacon said. "I couldn't say no." From a critical standpoint, at least, it seems he made the right choice, as it's one of the most acclaimed films Bacon's ever appeared in.

As fans of 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy know well, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), leader of the titular band of space heroes, names Kevin Bacon as one of his idols. When the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana) says she doesn't dance, Star-Lord tells her about an Earth "legend" in which "a great hero, named Kevin Bacon," teaches a town that "dancing is the greatest thing there is." You might understandably assume that someone let Bacon know he is honored in the film, but according to the actor, he had no idea.

Bacon told NME that not long after Guardians premiered, someone asked Bacon if he'd seen the movie. "And I said, 'No, I'm not planning on going.' They said, 'Okay, you should go.'" Everyone Bacon spoke to managed to keep the surprise under wraps, and Bacon eventually took their advice. "I sat in the theater all alone on a Tuesday afternoon. And there it was, and it was really kind of shocking."

Bacon said he was "touched" by the mention and reminded NME he'd not only worked with Guardians writer-director James Gunn before, but on a superhero film as well: Bacon played the villainous Jacques in the 2010 black comedy Super. Bacon went on to muse, "when you look at something like The Boys or even Kick-Ass, you know, Super was sort of ahead of its time, just in terms of a concept."

For a long time, Kevin Bacon wanted absolutely nothing to do with television. His feelings on the subject were so strong, he told The Guardian, that his managers knew to never bring it up. Just mentioning the idea would infuriate him: "I'd look at it like a vote of no confidence in my movie career," he said, "that I was going to be sent off to the television graveyard."

Two things changed the actor's mind. First, Bacon couldn't deny that what he was watching on TV was getting better and better. "I looked at the stuff I was consuming," Bacon said. "The Sopranos, The Wire – and I realized the writers went to TV because they'd been screwed by the movies." But the main reason was Bacon's wife, Kyra Sedgwick. Sedgwick is best known as the expert interrogator Brenda Leigh Johnson on the acclaimed police procedural The Closer. Bacon told NME that he was firmly "anti-television" before his wife's work on The Closer. "Then I saw how creatively rewarding Kyra's experience was and I started to open the door," he recalled. "I picked up the phone, called my reps and said, 'All right, time to start considering television.'"

Bacon's first leading TV role after that call was FBI agent Ryan Hardy on the crime thriller The Following. He's since starred in the Amazon Prime comedy I Love Dick, and later, the Showtime crime drama City on a Hill.