The “bucket list” actor Kevin Bacon called “one of our greatest movie stars ever”
With the greatest of respect, Kevin Bacon is not one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever movie stars. However, he has worked with more than a few names who potentially fit that bill, so he’s as qualified as anyone to pass judgment on which co-stars deserve to be enshrined in the annals of sheer wattage.
After all, he began his big-screen career alongside John Belushi in Animal House, and he kept acquiring the big names from there. For the last five decades, Bacon hasn’t always been the first name on the call sheet, and he’s often found himself much further down the hierarchy than that, but he’s had plenty of opportunities to rub shoulders with the best.
At various points, he’s shared an ensemble with Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, John Candy, Julia Roberts, Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Jeff Bridges, and Johnny Depp, all of whom either are or have at least spent many years residing in the upper echelons of the A-list, and he was directed by Clint Eastwood in Mystic River.
Those are some mighty big names, but as someone he watched from afar for the longest time without ever getting the chance to work with, he was over the moon when he took his talents to Netflix, hammed it up as an action movie villain, and found himself on the receiving end of several barbed insults as Eddie Murphy’s foil in Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.
“It’s a bucket list thing to work with him,” Bacon told People. “He is one of our greatest movie stars ever. Our paths never crossed in the ’80s. We never worked together. I don’t remember even having met him, I’m sure we probably did, but I don’t remember.”
Under most circumstances, you wouldn’t call an actor who’s been reduced to starring in nothing but legacy sequels and formulaic comedies that never see the inside of a multiplex as one of cinema’s all-time greatest stars, but even if you don’t think Murphy deserves the accolade, he’s definitely one of the most important.
Just because the Coming to America and Trading Places figurehead thinks it sounds pretentious to say so, it doesn’t mean that when he said he almost single-handedly pioneered the buddy cop genre and blazed a new trail for Black performers by becoming the first to consistently headline a string of blockbusters that found international box office success, that it isn’t true.
Without a doubt, Murray is one of the most influential stars in modern Hollywood, if not ever, since he kicked down several doors that countless others have walked through in the years since. Did he squander his talent on a string of shitty flicks? He did, and he knows it. Will he ever recapture his glory years again? Almost definitely not, but he knows that, too. Does that diminish what he did? Absolutely not.
He was on Bacon’s bucket list either way, and he was thrilled to draw a line through Murphy’s name, even if it came in a movie that, like most Netflix originals, regardless of who’s in them, played well for a couple of weeks before vanishing into the cultural ether.
