Kevin Bacon names the single hardest role of his career: “Every day was torturous”
If you’re a big fan of American Dad, the Seth Macfarlane show that isn’t Family Guy and features a sassy alien called Roger, then you will be aware of an episode from all the way back in 2007 called ‘Four Little Words’, during which he decides to turn himself into the actor Kevin Bacon solely due to trying on a selection of fake noses.
It was so good that for a while in my house any argument was settled with the immortal line “well screw you, I’m Kevin Bacon”, and indeed Bacon himself was so taken by Roger’s impersonation that for quite some time his Twitter avatar was of his cartoon alien self. So that alone shows he has a decent sense of humour and hasn’t let the whole being a Hollywood star thing go to his head over his seven decades of acting.
He’s also displayed pretty decent “hey I’m just an everyday kind of guy” behaviour by doing a lot of instagramming, not least songs about goats with his wife Kyra Sedgwick, with whom he’s now starring in a Netflix romantic comedy called The Best You Can, a film that’s got much better reviews than you might expect. In it, the couple play a doctor and a security guard who fall in love mostly by sending texts to each other, which is fitting given how much Bacon uses his phone (and pretty much works for EE).
It’s the third film Bacon has made together with his real-life wife, and the first since 2004’s The Woodsman, which, as movies go, was a tough sell to say the least. Bacon had to play a reformed kid molester in the film, something most actors wouldn’t have gone anywhere near, and he did get considerable praise for his performance despite reviews being decidedly mixed.
Not one to shy away from brave choices then, and a decade previously Bacon had taken on what he describes as his toughest role, in 1995’s Murder in the First, the story of a teenage criminal sent to Alcatraz and tried for murder that involved a considerable deal of suffering from Bacon during production.
He told Total Film: “Yeah, it was rough, man, really hard. I lost a lot of weight and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose, you know? Shooting Murder In The First was like shooting The Woodsman, in that there were no good days. Every day was torturous. I was naked and shackled; I had Gary Oldman beating me up; I was covered in bugs; and, to round things off, there was this massive earthquake.”
The earthquake of which Mr Bacon speaks was the 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 57 people in Los Angeles and injured 9,000 more, causing billions of dollars worth of damage. The Murder in the First film crew ended up having to relocate to temporarily live inside the abandoned Alcatraz prison.
Bacon added, “The walls were falling in… and Christian Slater’s trailer crashed onto its side. I got in my car and tried to get back to my family in Westwood, but my cellphone was dead and alarms were going and fires were raging. The freeway turned to rubble. The whole shoot kinda freaked me out.”
In the end, the movie wasn’t a resounding success, although Bacon was nominated for a Screen Actors’ Guild award and won a Critics’ Choice award for his performance as the young man on trial.
