The dreadful 2005 movie Kevin Bacon foolishly bet his future on: “I would like to do it more”
If Kevin Bacon was in any real danger of watching his career slip away from him, it would have happened by now. In fact, it would have happened a long time ago, but he’s still here and still working.
In industry terms, he’s basically unkillable at this point. He may not be one of Hollywood’s top stars, but Bacon has found a tidy little niche for himself, where he can pop up in movies or TV shows of almost any genre and do a solid job, alternating between leading roles, supporting parts, and character gigs.
The only time he really ran the risk of slipping into irrelevance was towards the end of the 1980s, and that was entirely his fault. The post-Footloose version of Bacon didn’t want to be a heartthrob, so he decided that the best way to branch out would be to star in a string of critical and commercial catastrophes.
His plan was hardly genius, but after boarding Oliver Stone’s JFK, which he called the single most important picture of his career, he hasn’t gone anywhere. That said, he did develop a reputation for favouring villains, oddballs, and generally reprehensible sorts, baggage he became desperate to shed.
You can see why: in the early 2000s, he played a murderous narcissist in Hollow Man, a psychopathic kidnapper in Trapped, a burnt-out cop in Mystic River, a stalker in In the Cut, and a convicted child molester in The Woodsman, all within the space of a few years.
Understandably, Bacon fancied a lighter change of pace, and in the hopes that it would open more doors to distance himself from troubled souls, he boarded Queen Latifah’s interminable 2005 comedy, Beauty Shop, as a flamboyant salon owner. There are many ways for an actor to enter a new chapter in their career, but the worst entry in the Barbershop franchise wasn’t it.
“I have a small part, a supporting part, but I play a hairdresser, and they let me just go wild,” he said at the time. “It was fantastic. I hope that the movie does well, just because maybe I could move a little bit away from this dark crap. I mean, I don’t want to be tortured all the time.” Did it do well? No, it did not.
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It was the worst-reviewed and lowest-grossing entry of the Barbershop series, barely eking out a profit in cinemas. Did it lead to more comedic opportunities? Not really, to be honest. Bacon has dabbled in the genre since then on numerous occasions, but Beauty Shop was hardly his coming-out party as the next Jim Carrey.
In fact, his next movie was Where the Truth Lies, a sexually explicit thriller that was rated NC-17, which he followed with The Air I Breathe, where he plays a man on a mission to safe his lover from a venomous snake bite, and a vigilante who goes on a brutal rampage to avenge his son’s murder in James Wan’s Death Sentence, so it hardly had the desired effect of easing him into lighter and fluffier fare.
