“I can’t put people in the seats”: the 1991 movie that saved Kevin Bacon’s “heartbreaking” career
Not every actor wants to be a movie star, and not every movie star feels the need to prove themselves as an actor, and Kevin Bacon has spent decades hovering somewhere around the middle of that divide.
He’s the kind of guy you can always rely on to give a solid performance in anything, whether it’s a big-budget blockbuster or a small-scale independent, but he isn’t quite the guy you’d rely on to play the leading role in one of those big-budget blockbusters to guarantee some arses in seats.
Hollow Man would be the case in point, since it’s the most expensive production he’s ever taken top billing in, but despite being a modest hit at the box office, Bacon hated every second of making it, which still wasn’t as much as Paul Verhoeven, who upped sticks from Hollywood and never looked back.
It’s not even an oversimplification to trace the Kevin Bacon we know today right back to Footloose: the cult favourite gave him his breakthrough role, but he wasn’t sold on the stardom that came with it, and he soon discovered that there are only so many flops any actor can make before they’re persona non grata.
The rest of his 1980s makes for damning reading. He was the main attraction in Quicksilver, White Water Summer, She’s Having a Baby, Criminal Law, and The Big Picture, all of which flopped in cinemas. His first film of the 1990s was Tremors, which he only made because he was fast running out of options.
“By the beginning of the ’90s, my career just wasn’t happening,” Bacon confessed. “I can’t put people in the seats. I’ve never been able to. There are people who can, and I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll take some smaller roles in movies that they’re in’. I don’t do this for the thrill of it. I do it so people can see it. If it doesn’t get seen, it’s heartbreaking.”
In 1991, Bacon appeared in four pictures, and one of them was emblematic of his new direction. Surrounded by top-tier names like Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Joe Pesci, Sissy Spacek, Jack Lemmon, and Walter Matthau, to name a few, Oliver Stone’s JFK was his biggest hit in years, and convinced him that he was on the right track.
He only had a relatively small part in the three-hour political epic as Willie O’Keefe, but that only emboldened him to make the most of his limited minutes, which he did. Instead of chasing the leading man dragon, which had left him staring irrelevance squarely in the face, Bacon used his residual fame to evolve into a character actor.
Three and a half decades later, he’s still in the oxymoronic position of being very famous without being a movie star in the most conventional sense of the term, so you can’t say that JFK didn’t achieve everything he wanted it to, and much more besides.
