The movie Kevin Bacon loathed every second of making: “It was horrible, I hated it”
Even though he’s taken top billing in plenty of movies and TV shows, Kevin Bacon isn’t really what you’d call a leading man, at least not by conventional standards.
Is he a recognisable actor with an impressive body of work who can play almost any kind of character under the sun? He is. Is he one of his generation’s most reliable performers? Also yes. Is he the kind of guy you’d hang a big-budget blockbuster on to put butts in seats? Based on the evidence, not really.
It’s only happened once, and it didn’t go to plan. Armed with an estimated budget of $90 million, Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man was, is, and probably always will be the most expensive production to give Bacon top billing and a starring role. It wasn’t a flop, but it wasn’t quite a success, either.
A box office haul of $195 million was a decent return for an R-rated hybrid of sci-fi, horror, and thriller, and the cutting-edge visual effects made for an impressive calling card. On the other side of the coin, it took a bit of a critical battering, Verhoeven hated making it, he wished he’d never bothered, and decided that it was the final straw for his Hollywood sojourn.
As for the leading man, Bacon called it the hardest and most physically demanding performance of his entire career, even though his protagonist, the increasingly malevolent Sebastian Caine, spends most of the running time either disguised, obscured, or completely invisible after subjecting himself to an experimental procedure.
Not only was it a taxing shoot, but it was a long one. Verhoeven shot Hollow Man chronologically, meaning that all of Bacon’s scenes where he was a flesh-and-blood human were captured first. Principal photography began in April 1999 and didn’t end until February 2000, with an injury to Elisabeth Shue slowing things down.
Even though audiences can’t see him for great stretches of the picture, he needed to be on set every day so that the other cast members had someone to interact with. That, coupled with the fact that he had to wear cumbersome and uncomfortable prosthetics for much of the time, made it a hellish experience.
“I had to wear this thing for like, probably, I don’t know, six or eight months, and it was horrible,” Bacon told James Corden while dangling one of the offending prostheses. “I hated it. I hated it. I can’t tell you how much I hated wearing this thing. It had to be glued to my face.”
As a cruel thank you for his efforts, the special effects team gifted the actor with the very thing that made him so miserable for the bulk of Hollow Man‘s ten-month shoot. Remarkably, he’s kept it ever since.
