KEVIN BACON
THE CITY ON A HILL ACTOR TALKS TO PARADE ABOUT HIS FAMILY, THE JOY OF PLAYING A BAD GUY AND WHY HE’S NEVER GOTTEN AN OSCAR.
I NEVER TAKE MY CAREER FOR GRANTED. It took me a very, very long time to learn how to say no to things because I always think my next gig will be my last. I CAN’T SHAKE THAT FEELING.
Fear not, Kevin Bacon will gamely field your questions about Footloose and that “Six Degrees” trivia game, as well as about his marriage to actress Kyra Sedgwick. But to really get him talking with a smile, ask him about the goats.
He gifted Sedgwick with Macon and Louie to celebrate the couple’s 32nd wedding anniversary, and he regularly serenades the goats with his guitar. “They’re doing great!” he says, adding that the pair reside on the couple’s farm in rural Connecticut along with two additional goats, two pigs, two alpacas and three miniature horses. “It’s off-brand because I’m a city kid. But I’m an animal person,” he says. “I find them calming as I get older.”
Bacon is 64. And though he doesn’t look it in his boyish jeans, plaid button-down shirt and boots on this summer afternoon, that age is the proud marker of a career that spans more than 40 years—and more than 100 film and TV roles. He’s done it all, from teen comedy (National Lampoon’s Animal House) and campy horror (Friday the 13th, Tremors) to smash dramas (A Few Good Men, Apollo 13) and comic book action (X-Men: First Class). No wonder Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the game that challenges players to connect the star with other celebrities—using the fewest collaborative projects as possible—was created in his honor.
Bacon is in his third season of the gritty crime-drama City on a Hill (premiering July 31 on Showtime). He plays Jackie Rohr, a corrupt former FBI agent who’s not above cutting corners—or drinking, doing drugs and cheating on his wife ( Jill Hennessy). Last seen throwing his badge into Boston Harbor, Jackie now works in private security for his shady former boss (Corbin Bernsen of
Psych and Major League fame). “My character comes up against very disturbing things that test his moral compass,” says Bacon, who’s also an executive producer of the series.
Jackie is a dyed-in-the-wool Boston guy; Bacon is all New
York City, having moved there from his native Philadelphia as a teenager. He and Sedgwick (who starred in the TNT series The
Closer), 56, raised their family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Their son, Travis, 33, is a touring rocker; daughter Sosie, 30, is an actress, recently seen in the HBO hit Mare of Easttown.
Ever busy and always looking forward, Bacon also recently released new music with his older brother, Michael (they record and perform as the Bacon Brothers), and has four new films in the pipeline. On a late afternoon in New York City, he talks to
Parade about his career, marriage and the movies he hoped would be his big breaks . . . but weren’t.
Are you the kind of actor who likes to revisit his career? No. The only time I look back is when I do interviews! I don’t have a rearview mirror. I don’t go back and watch my movies. I don’t collect memorabilia and don’t have any news clippings.
Do you take something from the set? I think I have a need to let a character go. A lot of people will keep their wardrobe, but I don’t, because it’s not me; it belongs to this “other man.” Which good-guy characters have you
liked portraying? Well, even though he was on the other side of the hero in terms of the trial, I think the character [prosecutor Jack Ross] in A Few Good Men was a good man. It wasn’t a traditional good guy versus bad guy thing, but he was an interesting character.
Is it fun to play City on a Hill’s Jackie Rohr, who is so morally compromised?
When you first become an actor, you start to judge your roles based on the number of words you have. After a while, you know that’s not really it. I did quite a few things in a row where I was trying to explore what I could do with less lines. With Jackie, here’s a voice that I heard right away. People think that because a character’s a bad guy, it’s more fun. I don’t believe that. What makes it fun is complexity, showing up and doing something that I haven’t done. It’s all about walking in someone else’s shoes.
What do you remember about A Few Good Men’s epic “You can’t handle the truth!”
courtroom scene with Jack Nicholson? It was amazing, and a great lesson for all actors. We had to shoot it many times to get the reactions of everyone in the room. Jack
came incredibly well-prepared and did that fantastic speech multiple times, and it just got better and better. And then the camera turned around to shoot me and Tom [Cruise] and Demi [Moore]. He just kept delivering it, but once he was off-camera, the hair started to get wild, and he unbuttoned his uniform and took off the tie. He was a little bit more Jack.
Let’s go back even further: What did your city planner dad and teacher mom think of you coming to New York
City at age 17? I’m the youngest of six, so I’m not sure they noticed! They were so fine with it. You know, my dad was a World War II vet. He was born in 1910. By the time I was born, they were not strict with me. When I told them that I wasn’t going to college, they could not have cared less. They weren’t focused on making money. They encouraged all of us to be creative and be good humans.
We’re all a little bit artistic.
How excited were you to land the role of a snotty fraternity pledge in Animal House so soon into your career? So many things about that experience were new for me. I couldn’t have guessed it would be such a phenomenon, but it wasn’t the breakout for me that I thought it was going to be. I had to go back to New York and work as a waiter and a busboy. I did a soap opera [Guiding Light] and became pretty entrenched in the off-Broadway scene and did a lot of theater. To tell you the truth,
Bacon was a 19-year-old acting school student when he got cast as fraternity pledge Chip Diller in the raucous comedy NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978). He admits he didn’t μÕĶÌi wÌ ĶOE ÜĶÌij LŖĶÃÌiÀŖÕà co-stars John Belushi and Bruce McGill on the Oregon set. Bacon recently reunited with DINER (1982) co-stars Tim Daly, Paul Reiser and -ÌiÛi ÕÌÌiOELiÀ} ÌŖ Ň>Àł Ìiji wŃŇ½Ã 40th anniversary. “It was awesome,” he
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[the 1982 film] Diner didn’t do anything for me either. It was a critical success, but it wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t Footloose.
Speaking of Footloose, did you think it seemed a little silly on paper when
you first read the script? Listen, I was happy to be getting a gig. I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. But did I think it was going to be what it was? No. And the other thing is that the producers told me it was going to be a musical. I said, “This is not a musical.” It wasn’t Mary Poppins or The King and
I. But they said we would be dancing to pop songs, which was a new idea at the time. When they mentioned the choreographer, I told them I didn’t need one. I said, “I really love to dance, and I’ll just dance around, and you turn on the camera.” I had no idea the extent of what the dancing would be!
When did you first meet Kyra? She was 12. I was 19 and at [New York City’s] Cherry Lane Theatre downtown doing a play. Her mom was a theater fan and had seen me in three or four plays and told her, “You should go see this actor. He’s good and I’m going to get you tickets.” So she went to a matinee with her brother and then went to a deli. I was there getting a sandwich before the evening show and [her brother] said, “That’s the actor! Go talk to him.” She walked up and said, “Hi, you were good in that play.” We reconnected years later [doing the 1988 TV movie Lemon Sky].
Who best remembered that fateful encounter? She did.
Why don’t you work together more often? We like to collaborate. Usually we’re directing each other. She’s a great filmmaker. As a producer, she’s also found material for me to direct. In terms of acting, I’ll tell you a story. I was in a small [2004] movie called
The Woodsman [about a convicted child molester returning to his hometown], and she played sort of my love interest.
Two weeks before filming, she had a crisis of conscience and wanted to pull out. She was like, “[Knowing we are married is] going to take people out of the film.” I told her, “You can’t do that.” She also had been cast first! [Sedgwick remained in the film.]
Surely, you’re often asked about the secret to a successful marriage. Does the answer change by the
decade? It’s a hard thing to answer. If you look at the statistics, nobody stays married, and nobody has ever proved to me that it’s any harder if you’re famous just because you’re doing kissing scenes. All I know is that we still enjoy our time together. Did you discourage your kids from
entering the family business? I didn’t specifically sit them down and say, “Please do anything else.” For our son, that ship had sailed from the time he was a very little boy; he played and sang and breathed music. We were really surprised when our daughter wanted to be an actor. She was more academic. Then at the beginning of her sophomore year, she packed up her car and her dog and came home and said she was going to be an actor. And we were like, “OK.” Why did she change her mind? I think she must have gotten the message that from the outside, [an acting career] can glow with possibilities. But on the inside? [As her parents, we knew] there’s a real lack of stability and
a lifetime of being told no. But look, [she and her brother] are definitely street-smart. Celebrity is complicated, and it’s not easy growing up in the public eye and experiencing fame secondhand. I’m extremely proud of the way they’ve navigated that. Did you all spend the height of the pandemic together?
I remember we were shooting City on a Hill in March [of 2020] and got a call that they were shutting down production. I went out to L.A. with my wife; my son had just moved to L.A. and hadn’t found a place yet, so he was staying with us. The three of us went into lockdown together.
Does the fact that you don’t have an Oscar nomination
rankle you at all? I’d love to get one. There’s only one reason why I haven’t, and that’s because members of the Academy haven’t seen anything I’ve done that they thought was of Oscar value. What’s great about the Oscar thing is that it opens up opportunities, because it helps certain movies get made. It’s a little harder to get parts when you don’t have “Oscar winner” or “Oscar nominee” in front of your name. Maybe it will happen someday. Maybe it won’t.
Do you really still need opportunities opened for you, at this point? Of course I do! I never take my career for granted. I’ve seen a lot of actors just fall away for whatever reason. Life can knock you down. I hope to keep working for a long time, and I feel so lucky to still be at it.