How Kevin Bacon’s career was changed by a show he never made: “It really did change”
Kevin Bacon got to witness a monumental shift in the perception of television.
Over the years, Bacon has earned his reputation as the actor who seemed to pop up in every movie based on his impressive output. Although he could have easily been a traditional leading man in the 1980s following his breakout role in Footloose, Bacon chose to take on all sorts of supporting, comedic, villainous, and bit parts, as he was more interested in the quality of the film than his screentime.
As a result, Bacon has one of the most eclectic and fascinating careers of any living actor; while he’s been in quite a few films that would be considered all-time classics, he’s also taken chances on unusual projects that are, at the very least, worthy of consideration.
One of the reasons that Bacon has been able to consistently appear in so many films is that he wanted to make acting on the big screen his speciality. It’s easy to forget that in the days before the “prestige” era of television, actors who worked on the small screen were considered to be “lesser” when compared to movie stars. Beyond the expectations of quality, actors on television had to spend so many weeks of the year shooting for weekly releases that they had less time to go off and make movies.
Bacon had resisted the idea of doing a television show for quite some time, but his eyes began to open to the possibilities of the medium when his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, began starring on the series The Closer.
“All of a sudden, the business changed, and it really did change,” Bacon said. “Kyra did seven years on The Closer, and I saw how satisfying that was for her. So, it was a difficult call for me to make, to say that I’m interested in television, because I felt like, in some ways, I was giving up and that I’d tried to be a movie actor and it didn’t work out, or something like that. That’s where your head goes, as an actor, but I had a really great experience doing The Following, so I was looking.”
The Following was a popular crime thriller series in which Bacon played an FBI Agent, and earned some of the best reviews of his career. While he wasn’t sure if this meant he wanted to only do television, Bacon said he began scouting out other potential projects, which led him to the Amazon comedy I Love Dick.
“I wasn’t like, ‘I’ve gotta get a show right now,’ but once I did television, there was no longer this thing of, ‘I’m not going to do that,’” Bacon said. “I was certainly thrilled that this opportunity became because it’s not an hour drama. As great as that is, and I like to work hard, The Following was so hard on my psyche and on my body. It was just really hard. The hardest gig there is in entertainment is to be the lead in an hour show, especially if it’s a show that’s blood and guts and fighting. It’s rough. I love to work, but to do something different is really exciting.”
I Love Dick, despite having half-hour episodes, was seen as a breakthrough for what could be done on streaming and led Prime Video to develop a more robust slate of prestige shows. Bacon worked with the streaming service again when he appeared in the horror dark comedy The Bondsman.
