“The movie chose me”: the controversial 2004 role Kevin Bacon “couldn’t say no” to
It always sounds a bit wanky when actors say they were born to play a part, there was a movie they were destined to make, or otherworldly forces made the decision for them. When Kevin Bacon said it, it was questionable, more than anything else.
For one thing, he’s always gone where the work is. After Footloose, he could have gone where the money was, but he didn’t want to, so he poured himself into acting instead. That meant he’d starred in seven films in four years, and not a single one of them was a hit, except Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Since digging his career out of the shitter with Oliver Stone’s JFK, the most important movie he’ll ever made, according to Bacon himself, he’s been almost everywhere and done almost anything. Film, television, genre, filmmaker, character: it doesn’t matter, because he’ll be there to do the job.
After the dark, dingy, and exhausting shoot of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, and the backlash that greeted Meg Ryan’s disastrous attempt at reinvention in the dire psychological erotic thriller, In the Cut, Bacon felt like he needed a change of pace and to explore lighter, less depressing avenues.
“I wanted to do something more mainstream,” he expounded in 2004. “I wanted to do something where I actually got paid, you know. I was just coming off Mystic River, and I didn’t want to do anything dark.” In most cases, that would lead to a blockbuster, a caper, a romp, or some kind of less taxing production.
Instead, Bacon immediately signed on to play a convicted child molester, recently released from prison and trying to reintegrate into society while suppressing the urges that got them incarcerated in the first place, in co-writer and director Nicole Kassell’s low-budget drama, The Woodsman.
It was basically the polar opposite of what he wanted to do, and by making a sex offender played by an established and popular actor the focal point of a story about redemption, one that encourages audiences to empathise and sympathise with Bacon’s Walter, it was a hugely controversial picture.
Why did he do it? From the way he tells it, he didn’t have a choice. “I felt the movie chose me, in a way,” he offered. “I couldn’t say no. And when I met Nicole, I found her to be young, yes, and really almost shy. But she seemed to be such a compassionate kind of person that I just felt like she could do it.”
In the end, Bacon gave one of his best performances in The Woodsman, which received rapturous acclaim. However, because of the subject matter, it was barely given a theatrical release to speak of, either in the United States or overseas, but it still played well enough to earn its $2.5 million budget back almost twice over.
