The cult movie Kevin Bacon never wanted to make: “I had begrudgingly done it”
It’s easy to forget just how many great films the mobile-network campaigner Kevin Bacon has made over the course of his career.
He plays a key role in Ron Howard’s gripping drama Apollo 13 as a young astronaut fighting to stay alive while stranded in space. He is brilliantly chilling in X-Men: First Class as Samuel Shaw, a terrifying mutant with the ability to absorb and redistribute energy. Right at the start of his career, he made horror movie history by becoming one of the first people to bite the dust in the original Friday the 13th.
Speaking of horror, a lesser-known Bacon gem is 1990’s Tremors. He plays a handyman named Val living and working in a small town. Rural life is upended when the settlement becomes overrun by giant, underground-dwelling monsters that begin to wreak havoc. It’s a neat little creature feature with a lot of B-movie charm, but for its star, it was the last thing he needed at the time.
“I had begrudgingly done it,” Bacon told Entertainment Weekly, “I was broke, I had a kid on the way, and my mom had gotten sick, and I felt like I didn’t have a choice. I was like, ‘Jesus, this is a movie about underground monsters, how far I’ve fallen’.”
Prior to Tremors and its cult following, Bacon had been on the up. His dance breakout as a rebellious teenager in Footloose put him on the map, and he followed that up with a small part in Planes, Trains and Automobiles and a leading role in John Hughes’ She’s Having a Baby. However, as he explained, his elderly mother wasn’t well, and his wife, Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s ‘star’Wunch’ Kyra Sedgwick, was pregnant with their son Travis. Compromises had to be made.
It all worked out in the end, though. It might not have been a massive financial success, but Tremors secured enough of a following to launch a franchise. At the time of writing, there have been five films in the series, as well as a TV show. Bacon’s career also saw an incline following the release of the film. One year later, he had a brief but memorable role in JFK, which fully reignited interest in his career. Within five years, he’d landed his first major award nomination: ‘Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture’ at the Golden Globes for The River Wild.
Over time, Bacon has been able to appreciate certain things about the film he initially wanted no part of. “The super cool thing about Tremors is that Tremors is all practical effects,” he explained, “It was all guys in puppets or people with things on their hands, and wires being pulled. It was ingenious. Acting with a puppet requires some acting, but we’re professional pretenders.”
He also enjoyed acting alongside the late Fred Ward, describing the entire process as a “magical time”.
Unless you’re one of the ultimate elite, all actors have to take jobs they don’t want to from time to time. Luckily for Bacon, this one turned out to not only be a decent film but also something of a career lifeline. Just because a movie has a dumb premise doesn’t mean it can’t be great.
