Kevin Bacon’s clash with Oliver Stone: “One of the most bizarre and insulting things”
The film industry is riddled with countless examples of high-profile feuds, with many artists often engaging in well-publicised spats about their differences. However, in the case of Kevin Bacon, who surprised audiences in 1991 by taking on a minor role as a gay hustler in Oliver Stone’s JFK, the Footloose star felt as if he got off on the wrong foot from the beginning of the project.
At the time, the star and filmmaker were on entirely different trajectories. Stone was one of the biggest directors in the business and was in the midst of a career-defining hot streak that had won him three Academy Awards and seen him contribute to an almost nonstop cavalcade of classics.
Within the space of a decade, the firebrand auteur had contributed to Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Doors as a writer, producer, or director, ensuring that he’d earned his spot at the top of the Hollywood ladder.
Bacon, meanwhile, was struggling to maintain his post-Footloose stardom. He’d never been out of work for too long, but memorable roles were becoming increasingly fewer and farther between. He was dedicated to reinventing himself as a committed and chameleonic character actor who could also be a leading man, but he was left fuming when Stone effectively cut him out of his first table read for JFK.
“It was a great part,” he admitted to Cigar Aficionado. “But I was afraid of whether or not Oliver and I were gonna connect on it. I didn’t audition. We had a table read, and I hadn’t really put the pieces together yet. He said, ‘I want you really to be transformational with this’. I took that very seriously. I really wanted to do something with it. Figure out who the guy was.”
By his own admission, Bacon “didn’t have a hook on it yet” by the time of the table read, and Stone didn’t even give him a chance. When the gathered cast reached the part where Willie O’Keefe had his lines, the director completely ignored him and had Kevin Costner recite his dialogue because he’d briefly met the person Bacon’s character was based on.
“Oliver goes, ‘Yeah, Perry Russo. Kevin’s met him. Kevin, read Bacon’s lines like Perry Russo,'” he recalled. “It was one of the most bizarre and insulting things that I had ever heard of. I was floored. I called up my agent, who was also Oliver’s agent, and I said, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can work with this guy’. She told me to hang in there. So when we got to the set to actually play the scenes, a lot of what is there is me out there sort of kicking ass.”
In a way, it had the desired effect. Bacon was so annoyed by Stone excluding him from the table read that he went out of his way to make sure every second of his screentime as O’Keefe saw him working at the top of his game.
