Kevin Bacon

On limited dialogue, working with kids, and the new Spidey director...

Your character, Sheriff Kretzer, is a man of few words… I started out [ in the business] as an extra. When you’re an extra you say, “Well, I hope I can some day get a line.” Then once you get a line you hope you can get two. It puts you in the headspace of judging your roles based on how many lines you have. Then you start to realise there’s a lot of stuff that’s not about the amount of lines. If you can tell the story of who this guy is with a look, with a piece of wardrobe or a way of walking, with the timbre of somebody’s voice… Didn’t you create your own backstory? I’m not going to disclose all of his secrets but I felt that he had grown up in Texas or Oklahoma, but was now in Colorado. He is enamoured of the Old West, the Jesse James and Wyatt Earps and Jim Bowies and George Armstrong Custers of the world, who were out there kicking ass and taking prisoners. He’s sort of stuck in that world. How was working with your young co-stars? Great kids. One thing I really loved about them is that they’re very, very real. They’re not overly precocious. They talk like 10-yearold boys. That’s a testament to Jon [ Watts] and his writing. I think that Jon was definitely influenced by things like Stand By Me. I also loved being on the set with them because their enthusiasm was so infectious. They were so jazzed about being there. What do you think of Jon Watts landing the Spider-Man reboot? I wasn’t surprised at all. I felt like when you look at Cop Car you see tension, you see performance, you see heart, you see a good shot selection – all things that go into making compelling movies, whether they’re $200m movies or $200,000 movies. If I was running the studio, I would have given him the movie in a heartbeat. JMc