The iconic role in a classic movie Kevin Bacon refused to play: “For whatever reason, he passed”
Every actor has at least one role they’ll always regret turning down, and for Kevin Bacon, it wasn’t an iconic character in a classic movie that became a critical, commercial, cultural, and awards season phenomenon, which is nothing if not unusual.
Instead, he pointed to the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. It’s the only movie he auditioned for and didn’t get that he desperately wanted to be a part of, not that he’s ever been one to dwell on the past. Bacon found his niche and stuck to it, at least after he’d escaped the stranglehold Footloose placed on his nascent career, and looking backwards doesn’t really factor into his thinking.
Tremors is the only one of his films that he’s seen more than once, and it’s also the only sequel he ever wanted to make, but that opportunity was ripped away when the pilot episode for a proposed sequel series on TV wasn’t picked up. Instead of commiserating, he kept his eyes focused in front of him.
The star has credited Oliver Stone’s JFK as a pivotal moment in his career, which helped usher in the era of Kevin Bacon: Character Actor and Extraordinaire and Occasional Leading Man, which has dictated his trajectory for the last three decades. A couple of years later, an even bigger opportunity presented itself, but he knocked it back.
“I was working on Forrest Gump, and the role of Lieutenant Dan, Robert Zemeckis very much wanted Kevin Bacon to play the role,” casting director Ellen Lewis told The Huffington Post. “And for whatever reason, he passed on that.” Maybe he didn’t care for the script, but with the benefit of hindsight, it could have changed everything.
Not only would it have been, and still would be, the highest-grossing entry in his filmography by a massive distance after hoovering up almost $700 million at the box office, but it realistically could have landed Bacon that which has eluded him for the last half-century; an Academy Award nomination.
His loss was undoubtedly Gary Sinise’s gain, and he was only brought in because Bacon declined. “I said to Bob, ‘Do you remember that I had shown you some tape on Gary?'” Lewis recalled. “We got him in, he auditioned, he got the role.” In Sinise’s hands, Lieutenant Dan became the most important role of his professional life, in more ways than one.
Coincidentally, the part secured Sinise the first, and still only, Oscar nod of his career, but it was the aftermath that made Forrest Gump such an instrumental part of his existence. It inspired him to found the Gary Sinise Foundation, an organisation that provides assistance and support for injured military veterans and their families through a number of charitable programmes.
That wouldn’t have happened if Bacon played the part, and you could say that everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Yes, he missed out on a ‘Best Picture’ winner that left a massive cultural footprint, dominated awards season, and could have potentially gotten him on the Oscars shortlist for the first time, but Sinise used the film as the springboard to bigger and better things that had nothing to do with cinema.
