How being “not fuckable” almost cost Kevin Bacon his big break: “You’re not a leading man”
Although you might not use this exact terminology, most people would agree that Kevin Bacon is highly fuckable indeed. Take a gander at that steamy shower scene in Apollo 13. The movie is ostensibly about space travel, but Bacon’s partially towel-clad physique deserves a special mention in any synopsis.
According to the EE brand ambassador himself, however, being a sex symbol was not his initial calling in the industry. He made early inroads into film acting in movies like National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978 and Friday the 13th two years later, but it wasn’t until he played Fenwick in Barry Levinson’s Diner in 1982 that critics decided he was worth paying attention to.
Unfortunately for Bacon, his character in the film was a troubled twenty-something alcoholic, and not in the swaggering, smouldering (fuckable) mode of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Fenwick is shabby and pitiable, and that seemed to shape how casting directors thought of the actor who brought him to life.
During an interview with The Guardian in 2003, Bacon recalled that when the film Footloose was being cast, he was hardly in contention to play the rebellious dancing transfer student, Ren McCormick. It wasn’t that he was obviously too old to play a high school student (this clearly didn’t bother them), it was that he just wasn’t hot enough.
“The studios, directors, casting directors, they pretty much want you to be the one you were in your last one,” he said, magnanimously, noting that his performance in Diner hadn’t exactly been an audition for the lead role in Footloose. Paramount executive Barbara Steel certainly didn’t think so, vetoing the young actor’s chances by labelling him ‘unfuckable.’ Bacon gets it. “I hadn’t done a lead kind of thing,” he said, “And when she says you’re not fuckable, that’s basically it – you’re not a leading man.”
Luckily, director Herbert Ross and the executive producer decided to show rather than tell Steel that Bacon was the man for them. They concocted a wardrobe test in which the young would-be star tried on the clothes that Ren would wear, all set to a rock soundtrack. This was not a dissimilar process to the one by which the filmmakers had initially identified Tom Cruise as the frontrunner for the role. After seeing him dancing around wearing not very much in Risky Business, they were convinced he was perfect. Perhaps the similarities were what sealed the deal for Bacon after Cruise turned it down.
When Footloose was released, it was a resounding box office success, even becoming the seventh-highest grossing film of the year behind the likes of Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters. It was a good year for cinema. The critics, on the other hand, were less impressed. A review in The New York Times referred to the movie as trash and that appeared to be the general consensus. All of them were wrong, of course, and Bacon became a heartthrob to an untold number of audience members.
Ironically, this type of leading man status, which had been so hard-won, turned out to be pretty onerous for the actor. Bacon later reflected that he hadn’t wanted to be a pop star or a pinup star or anything other than a serious thespian. He rejected Footloose so completely that it would take nearly a decade for him to, as it were, find his feet again in movies like JFK and A Few Good Men.
