Kevin Bacon names the hardest role of his career: “Incredibly physically taxing”
Awards aren’t what define an actor, at least those who aren’t obsessed with amassing as many shiny trinkets as possible, but that doesn’t make it any less true to call Kevin Bacon one of the greatest actors to have never been nominated for an Academy Award.
He’s been in so many movies most people have seen that there’s even an entire game dedicated to how quickly anyone in Hollywood can be linked to the star through ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’, and he’s held up his end of the bargain in a myriad of classics covering almost everything cinema has to offer.
Bacon was murdered in Friday the 13th, danced like his life depended on it in Footloose, conspired with Oliver Stone on JFK, pitted his wits against Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, devastated in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, embraced cult status in Tremors, and travelled beyond the stars in Apollo 13.
Presences don’t come much more ubiquitous than Bacon, who’s become a fixture of screens big and small in a career that kicked off back in 1978 when he made his feature debut in rambunctious comedic favourite Animal House, and during that time he’s played a number of exhausting characters.
Bacon has embodied dancers, criminals, cops, killers, astronauts, soldiers, lawyers, federal agents, doctors, scientists, sex offenders, husbands, fathers, supervillains, CGI-enhanced monsters and plenty more besides, but the one part he found more demanding than any other ended up sending an auteur scurrying away from American cinema forever.
“All roles are hard in different ways,” Bacon mused to Pop Entertainment. “Some are physical. Actually, the hardest role physically I did was Hollow Man, and I was invisible in the movie. But it was incredibly physically taxing, and it got delayed. Other times it’s hard because the script sucks or the director is an asshole.”
In Paul Verhoeven’s blockbuster update on The Invisible Man, Bacon goes for broke as Sebastian Caine, an arrogant genius who decides the best way to test out his new formula is to inject it into himself. As he becomes increasingly transparent, though, he begins to succumb to madness and develops an unhealthy taste for murder and mayhem.
The fact Hollow Man was shot in chronological order would perhaps indicate that Bacon wouldn’t even be required for great swathes of production when he spends much of the running time as a man who can’t be seen. However, Verhoeven realised very early on that it was much better for the cast and crew for the star to be present so the rest of the actors had somebody to interact with.
As a result, Bacon had to give a performance in the style of an exaggerated and diabolical horror villain, knowing full well that audiences wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing, which would have presented a challenge of its own. It wasn’t entirely worth it when Hollow Man put the exclamation point on Verhoeven’s Hollywood career and took a battering from critics, with the CGI ironically winning more praise than Bacon did.
