No Time to Die: Kevin Bacon is The Rake's Issue 99 Cover Star
Kevin Bacon is back as The Bondsman, a murdered bounty hunter given a second life by the Devil. Bacon himself is still busy making plans in this one — there are more parts to play, songs to write, maybe even awards to win (if the Oscars will have him back). But if he’s challenged to pass judgment on his fearless life and career, writes STEPHEN WOOD, is he ready?
Kevin Bacon doesn’t much care what you think of him. He’s seen enough not to worry about image and status, those twin impostors of fame. On his approach to life, for example: “I don’t mind making an asshole of myself, basically.” On his personality of old: “I was such a cocky little shit.” On his adventurous, restless career: “I’ve made some bad choices, let’s face it.” On being recognised: “Fuck, people give you shit, people stop you and say ‘I love you’ — to be told that someone loves you is gold.” On staying grounded: “My wife jokes with me that I have this way of finding these incredibly important directors and doing the one movie with them that nobody saw. She says that’s, like, my talent.” Candour, humility, bullshit detector: as with any great movie character, you can't help but root for him.
He even deadpanned once about his legacy — “No Oscars but at least I have a game named after me” — and wondered whether he’d make the cut for the In Memoriam section of the Academy Awards. The Rake talks to him three days after the 97th Oscars are held in March. Bacon had put on a slick, dark suit alongside his wife, the actress and director Kyra Sedgwick, at the Vanity Fair watch-party in L.A., though he’d not attended the ceremony itself. For the last time he did that, you have to rewind to 1984. Then, he was asked to present an award (for best sound effects editing), and the clean-cut, fresh-faced star of Footloose — one of ’84’s highest-grossing films — was the talk of the town. “It was crazy,” Bacon has recalled. “I was the It boy of the year, right? I’d done movies, but Footloose was the thing that entered me into the world of Hollywood, if you will.”
He’s shared the billing with a collection of screen legends — Nicholson, De Niro, Streep and Hoffman — and been directed by a similarly rarefied bunch — Eastwood, Stone, Verhoeven and Campion. A quick calculation shows he has more than a hundred credits in film, television and theatre from half a century in the business. All of which is to say: while Bacon might not take himself too seriously, his work won’t ever get the same treatment, and he still cares what you think of it, very much. “I love acting,” he says. “I’m precious only to the extent that I love the work. The time between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ to me is the best. That time is a place where actors need to have an opportunity to soar, and to use the skills we’ve honed and the vulnerability we’re gonna show and the culmination of all the rejection we’ve experienced in the course of our lives.”
I’m precious only to the extent that I love the work. The time between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ to me is the best.
Bacon has always had one foot in the “world of Hollywood” and one foot in what might be called Normal Town — or, in Bacon’s case, Normal Land. He and Sedgwick divide their time between Manhattan and their farm in rural Connecticut, where they keep several animals and entertain millions of social media followers with down-home insights into their lives. “I have a certain kind of separation, in a funny kind of way, from [the showbusiness] industry,” he told the SmartLess podcast in 2022. “I’ve never felt 100 per cent in it, in the community.”
He bought the farm in 1983, four years before he and Sedgwick met (on the set of Lemon Sky) and five before they were married. “I don’t know whether it was a movie experience, or seeing a T.V. show — a western, or something like that — but I always had a romantic fantasy about horses and being on horses,” he says. “So in ’83, just as a goof, I went out with a real estate broker, pretending I was house shopping, which I really wasn’t, and in this part of Connecticut — I had no connection to it — I saw this place and I just said, Yeah, I’ll take it.
“I would say it’s lived up to the fantasy. But you know, when I first met Kyra, she moved into the farm with me, and in those days I had this super-romantic idea about living off the land; I was very solitary when I met her, I thought it’d just be me and the horses and a dog, and I’d go off and work and then return to a kind of chopped-wood, simplistic existence... But eventually Kyra was like, ‘I can’t live this life any more, it’s too boring!’ So we packed up and raised our kids in the city, and it was the greatest idea she had.”
I had this romantic idea about living off the land on the farm, but eventually Kyra said, This life is too boring!
‘Outsider status’ is too strong a phrase for it, but Bacon’s hedged existence as a movie star has left its mark on his work. In 1996 he said he wanted to keep Hollywood “on its toes” about his selection of roles and projects, and he has been true to his word. Not least in his loyalty to horror films, a genre that is more or less scorned by the taste-making establishment. Bacon, who starred in Friday the 13th in 1980, Flatliners in 1990 and MaXXXine last year, has returned to horror (with a comedic twist) in some of his latest output: The Bondsman, an Amazon series that airs in April, and Family Movie, which, appropriately enough, he’ll co-direct with Kyra and appear in beside Kyra, Travis and Sosie.
He appears dead-set on changing Hollywood’s attitude to horror. “A hundred per cent,” he says. “Well, let me put it this way: I would say that that would be a nice result. I’m not on a personal crusade to get people to take it more seriously, and I think it’s come a long way in terms of that. Certainly, Jordan Peele [the director of Get Out and Us] has moved the needle a whole lot. But I also think back to some of the horror that was super-influential to me: The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby and the actresses in Don’t Look Now. I put them in the same category as Dog Day Afternoon and The Godfather.
In The Bondsman, Bacon is Hub Halloran, a murdered bounty hunter given a chance to atone for his mistakes when he’s brought back to life by the Devil. In Family Movie, the real-life Bacons play a family of filmmakers who find themselves in a meta horror flick when a body is discovered on the set of their latest slasher.
He’s also been busy making the limited-series Sirens for Netflix and a “left-of-centre rom-com” with Sedgwick, The Best You Can, which they hope to launch at the Tribeca film festival in June. As well, he is the founder of a charity and a singer-songwriter-guitarist in a band. Not as a hobby, either: the Bacon Brothers — he and his older sibling Michael — have released multiple albums since 1997 and regularly tour or play live. Kevin is 66 years old: can we not interest him in a holiday?
“Nah,” he says, grinning and shaking his head more than once. “It’s never been something I’ve relished. I’ve always been driven from the time I was a child. Don’t ask me why. I’ve tried to parse it out with therapists or whatever, but I’ve always been driven to get shit done. I’m a little bit of a — I would say I’m a workaholic, which I think I am, but I’m also a ‘creating-aholic’.”
I’ve always been driven from when I was a child. Don’t ask me why. I’ve tried to parse it out with therapists.
His first paid job in acting, he says, came when he was 15 or 16 and still at high school — he earned about $450 by appearing in a recruitment video for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. His mother was not impressed. “She was a serious anti-war activist and civil rights activist,” he told the SmartLess podcast. “This wasn’t so far on the heels of Vietnam... I said, ‘I’m taking this gig’, and she didn’t speak to me for like, a week.”
It was his first hit of fame and fortune. He moved to New York at 17 and set about making it, in the New York style. He enrolled at the Circle in the Square drama school, slept on a piece of foam in a single-room occupancy building on the Upper West Side, and waited tables between auditions. His major screen debut came in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), though he needed to supplement it with T.V. soaps and stage work (in ’82 he made his Broadway debut in The Slab Boys alongside a couple of other wannabes called Sean Penn and Val Kilmer).
Then Footloose changed everything. His performance as Ren, the rebel high-school student who gets a small American town dancing again, turned him not just into a leading man but a “teenybopper”, and he became “exactly the person, the actor, I didn’t want to be, because I wanted to be a serious actor”. He told The Guardian last year: “There was a lot of pressure in it when it finally happened. I’m not sure I was really ready. I continued doing leads for a lot of years, but I wasn’t really doing it very well. I was doing it O.K. But the movies weren’t successful. My picker was off.”
“People told me that you only get three bombs and then you’re history. Well, once I got on about the fifth one I was like, I’m still here and I’m not bad and I’m getting better. And there was no plan B, so what’re you gonna do? ‘Oh, boo-hoo, my movie didn’t perform at the box office’? All of a sudden I had kids; I was like, I gotta keep working, gotta figure out some way to support them.”
People told me you only get three bombs and you’re history. Once I got on the fifth one I was like, I’m still here.
A battle over the nature, effects and politics of masculinity has raged in the past decade, of course. Bacon reckons his ideal has been bastardised. “I feel like we’re at this weird time right now where people are dismissing any kind of male sensitivity, vulnerability, and the ability to listen, understand and be compassionate about other people’s point of view as being weak and unmanly,” he says. “Personally I think that’s bullshit. These are things I strive for: compassion, empathy, the ability to listen to various points of view, the ability to spend time with women or with people of a different sexual orientation and have an honest and meaningful exchange — and I feel all man! I don’t ever doubt that any of those things makes me less of a dude, you know?
“When I see that kind of, whatever, macho posturing, to me it’s just a pretty simple line towards insecurity.”
Bacon won’t be writing this era’s version of The Crucible — he says others are more capable of creating overtly political art — but he has previously engaged in direct activism. Before last year’s U.S. presidential election, for instance, he and Sedgwick became spokespeople for Swing Left, an organisation that encourages swing states to turn Democrat, and Bacon has honoured his mother’s memory by speaking out about the importance of voting.
Before dystopia comes for us all, how about a feelgood episode, and that elusive Oscar?
“This is what I can tell you,” Bacon says. “I would like to believe there was a point in my life that, being super-successful, I had a certain amount of impostor syndrome or guilt about having gotten that. I don’t feel that any more. If opportunities come my way, I’m like, Yeah, that’s great, and I deserve it. I don’t feel undeserving, let’s put it that way. I’ve worked really hard, I’ve worked really long. I’ve tried to do my best, and I also try to get better.”
This is what I can tell you:
I don’t feel impostor syndrome any more. If opportunities come my way, I deserve it.
Inescapably, on the horizon also lies the ‘M’ word — mortality — and what we can get in under the wire. Bacon, a master of horror and villainy, is at least well versed in the concept of death: there can’t be many actors working today who have had more on-screen demises than him. “That’s why I never get sequels,” he jokes, before confronting the serious stuff. “I guess the fact that I keep looking forward means I’m a little bit racing [mortality]. I do feel like I’m racing the clock a bit on that. I would like to believe that I’m pretty accepting of it, but I haven’t looked it in the eye yet. You don’t really know until you’re there, and you go, ‘I changed my mind — I do wanna be resuscitated’.”
He laughs again, then falls silent for a moment while he considers it from another angle, and makes the most important judgment of all. “At this point,” he says, “if it happens, if I die tomorrow, I’m good. Like, I would want the people around me to know that I’m O.K. with what I got done and the life I lived. Yeah. I really feel that way, you know? I’m good.”
I guess the fact I keep looking forward means I’m a little bit racing the clock on mortality.
Grooming: Beate Petruccelli
Photography team: Brandon Smith, Kevin McHugh, Paul Rae
Special thanks to Copious Management
