Kevin Bacon Tried to Self-Sabotage After 'Footloose'

Kevin Bacon talked to Penn Badgley about fame on a recent episode of Podcrushed.

“When I became a pop star, the last thing I wanted to be was a pop star. I had already moved into, you know, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl or John Cazale or De Niro. I want to work with Scorsese. I want to do Chekhov.’ You know what I mean?” he said.

“I was so into what my idea of a serious actor was, and all of a sudden I was given this thing that was completely not a serious actor.” He’s talking about Footloose, of course. “So I rejected it, like, full on. And really, I think in some ways, I tried to self-sabotage that piece of myself and my popularity.”

Now, I take issue with this stance. Footloose is a DRAMA. Have we forgotten that? What’s more serious than the banning of dance? Bacon’s character, Ren, saved that town from decades of doom and gloom!

But the level of fame the heroic role garnered was too much for him. It gave him “self-doubt” and “anxiety.” Then, to make matters worse, people started playing a party game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where someone named a random actor and then someone else named another one that had been in a movie with the first one and they kept doing that until they ended up on Kevin Bacon. Which … sounds hard.

“I thought that the joke of it was that the great actors could be connected to a loser actor like me. They were saying, ‘Look, can you believe he can be connected by Meryl Streep?’” Bacon reflected on the game.

But he “eventually learned to embrace it” by starting a nonprofit, 6 Degrees, in 2007, that “supports impactful initiatives to sustain and enrich local communities,” whatever that means, and just recently launching the Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon podcast, where he has interviewed people like Mark Ruffalo and, my favorite weirdo, Matthew McConaughey.

And let that be the last of the Footloose slander.