The movie that convinced Kevin Bacon to become an actor: “Really, really, super influential”
Perhaps you were first introduced to Kevin Bacon as Ren McCormack in 1984’s Footloose, desperate to dance in spite of obstacles, or perhaps (especially if you’re from a younger generation) you best know him from his long running partnership with EE. He’s a man that possesses range, after all.
Bacon has spread himself across a wide variety of genres since he started acting in the early 1980s, and decades later, he’s still going strong as a well known star of television and film, finding himself in everything from Apollo 13 to Crazy, Stupid, Love. It seems like no genre is off limits for Bacon, who is open to the potential to tell powerful stories no matter the framework, whether that be horror, sci-fi, drama, or romantic comedy.
However, his desire to become an actor didn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s a dream that so many people have, yet they never act on it, believing that it’s something that simply happens to other people. Bacon didn’t think like this though, and after watching a certain film, he knew that he had to go for it and throw himself into the world of cinema, no matter how hard it might be.
His interest in the art form truly formed in his brain after he saw John Schelsinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which won various Oscars upon its release in 1969, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. The filmmaker had started his career in Britain with classics like the Bradford-set drama Billy Liar and the Swinging London tale Darling, but with Midnight Cowboy, he made a film that is quintessentially American.
Bringing the grittiness of the British kitchen sink tradition to Midnight Cowboy, set in New York City, the movie was hugely influential due to its depiction of masculinity and homosexuality. When Bacon first saw it, he knew it was something special. Talking to Rolling Stone, the actor revealed: “A really influential movie on me; it was a big part of why I wanted to become an actor. We had one of those dollar theaters in the neighborhood, the kind that ran films on a second or third run. I saw it after it had been out for a while, and I remember thinking ‘Wow, how did they get this homeless guy to show up to make the movie? And isn’t that cool that this cowboy was also in it.’”
The movie proved to be a cinematic initiation for him, opening his eyes to a world of similar films that subsequently blew his mind. “And then a little later, I see The Graduate and I see Coming Home and I go, ‘So this is what an actor does.’ So Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight were like really, really super influential on me in terms of what I want to do with my life. It was like, ‘Okay, I get it now. This is the kind of actor I want to be.'”
Luckily for Bacon, he got the chance to star alongside Hoffman, one of his acting heroes, in the 1996 film Sleepers. It was widely acclaimed and earned a significant amount at the box office, but for Bacon, it’ll always be the movie that allowed him to fulfill a dream he’d surely had since first seeing Midnight Cowboy.
