Kevin Bacon’s most mystifying rejection still haunts him: “I scratch my head to this day”
If you want to be a successful actor, you’ll have to eat a lot of shit, and even when you become a successful actor, you’ll still have to eat a lot of shit, as Kevin Bacon can attest.
He’d always dreamed of making it as a thespian, and when he did, he opted to hit the self-destruct button right after Footloose had turned him into a star, deciding that if he wanted to be taken seriously, he had to turn his back on the mainstream to prove that he had the chops.
As a result, not to keep bringing shit up as a metaphor, he found his career “in the toilet” by the turn of the 1990s, but he clawed his way back to prominence instead of being flushed away forever. For the last three decades, he’s been a fixture on the screen, so not allowing himself to be pigeonholed has actually worked out pretty well in the long run.
For a long time, though, Bacon shared the same mindset as many of his peers: fuck TV. It was an admission of defeat that your best days were in the past, but just like almost everyone else, the arrival of the 21st century’s ‘Golden Age’ of small-screen storytelling convinced him to break his vow.
The actor’s first recurring role on television in 30 years saw him headline three seasons of the crime thriller, The Following, and since then, he’s appeared in three more, as well as a Netflix limited series. The downside is that two of them got cancelled after a single season, and one of them still stings.
In August 2016, I Love Dick premiered on Prime Video. The title might be a cheap gag, but the show, which starred Kathryn Hahn as a struggling artist who becomes increasingly obsessed with Bacon’s title character to the point that she begins writing sexually provocative letters to him that aren’t supposed to be delivered to the recipient, drew strong reviews from critics.
Unfortunately, what it didn’t draw was an audience, and eight months after its eighth and final episode had aired, it was cancelled. “I have to tell you, I scratch my head to this day about what the fuck happened,” Bacon confessed to Interview. “Why didn’t we get another season?” Because nobody watched it, that’s why, but he was viewing it from a non-analytical perspective.
“We went to Sundance, and the response at Sundance was phenomenal,” he offered. “It was like presenting the coolest indie that happened to be a television series. And then it was gone. And the weirdest thing was, at the end, I got a Golden Globe nomination, and there I was after having a show cancelled, sitting at the Golden Globes with the executives at the table.”
His nomination for ‘Best Actor in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy’ was richly deserved, but it didn’t mean much when Bacon had to attend the ceremony, probably knowing fine well that he wouldn’t win, surrounded by the very people who’d decided that I Love Dick wasn’t worthy of a second run, and he still hasn’t gotten over it.
