Kevin Bacon reveals he tried to evade fame following success of ‘Footloose’
Actor Kevin Bacon has reflected on the 1984 hit Footloose, the movie that launched his career, and how he initially struggled with the intense fame it earned him.
Bacon looked back on the musical drama during a recent episode of Podcrushed, hosted by You star Penn Badgley alongside Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari. He said he didn’t only want to be known for his dancing performance as the protagonist, Ren McCormack, in Footloose.
“When I became a pop star, the last thing I wanted to be was a pop star,” Bacon said. “I had already moved into, you know, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl [Streep] or John Cazale or [Robert] De Niro. I want to work with [Martin] Scorsese. I want to do Chekhov.’ You know what I mean?”
He continued, “I was so into what my idea of a serious actor was, and all of a sudden I was given this thing [Footloose] that was completely not a serious actor. So I rejected it, like, full on. And really, I think in some ways, I tried to self-sabotage that piece of myself and my popularity.”
The Hollywood star said that although he had dreamed of magazine interviews and photoshoots as a child, once he started doing them, it made him “very, very uncomfortable.”
“Everything that I had dreamed of gave me a tremendous amount of self-doubt but also anxiety,” Bacon recalled. After Footloose was released and became a hit, the party game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ also became popular, which only exacerbated his anxiety. He was “horrified by it.”
“I thought that, and this is my own acting insecurity — impostor syndrome — I thought that the joke of it was that the great actors could be connected to a loser actor like me,” he reflected. “They were saying, ‘Look, can you believe he can be connected by Meryl Streep?’ By the way, I think I had already worked with Meryl Streep, so it wasn’t even … It’s just in my own head.”
Over time, though, Bacon learned it wasn’t an attack, and he got used to fame. “I eventually learned to embrace it, and I realised it wasn’t really going away,” he concluded. “It’s not a thing, it’s not anything you can hold. … It’s just an idea.”
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