The one actor Kevin Bacon has “always dreamed” of working with
Many people these days might be surprised to know that there was once a time when Kevin Bacon was a huge Hollywood star and not someone who pops up on TV occasionally to sell mobile phone contracts to British families just trying to have their fish fingers for tea in peace.
Back in the 1990s, for example, Bacon was an ever-present in massive, critically acclaimed movies like Apollo 13, JFK and A Few Good Men rather than simply flogging iPhones to pay for a new swimming pool.
Perhaps we’re being a little unfair to the very talented Bacon, who is now nearly 50 years into a career that began on the big screen with the classic comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House and continues with the likes of this year’s demon-slaying action horror Amazon TV series The Bondsman, which garnered some very good reviews.
He is still seemingly very ambitious and has a hitlist of people he’d like to work with, including Denzel Washington, the two-time Academy Award-winning star of Training Day and Gladiator 2, who was named the greatest actor of the 21st century by the New York Times. Nothing like aiming high.
Bacon told Backstage, “I’ve always dreamed of working with Denzel. He’s a great listener, and he listens as well as he speaks. I’ve met Denzel a couple of times, and I get the feeling that he seems to really love acting in the same way that I do. Like, I just love acting.”
He elaborated further on why he working with him would be a gift, noting, “And if you look at someone like Denzel, the people that are in the scenes with him are always really good because I think they have an understanding that you have to play the whole scene, that they’re being listened to, and that you are part of making that scene work.”
The actor may not have worked directly with Washington, but thanks to the famous ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, it’s possible to link them pretty quickly. Denzel was in the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks, who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon—done, and that was only two degrees of separation. Plus, Bacon was born in Philadelphia, if another stepping stone were needed.
While he has Washington on his wishlist, Bacon may well have to wait his turn as The Equalizer legend takes on very few projects, only averaging one film per year for the past two decades. Perhaps it’s surprising that the pair have never been cast together, especially when you consider both were reaching something of a peak in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Bacon, for his part, made some superb films during that period, including Mystic River, Where the Truth Lies and 1996’s Sleepers, in which he lined up alongside some true greats of the craft like Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman.
The actor also says he’d like to work with Quentin Tarantino one day: “Sure, his dialogue is fantastic, but he also has the courage. Again and again and again, he’s doing some kind of crazy, violent movie, and he’ll just stop and have people sit there and talk to each other for a really long time, and it’s just fucking awesome.”
The Bondsman, meanwhile, is yet to be renewed by Amazon for a second season, although Bacon has irons in other fires, too. He’s appeared in five episodes of the dark comedy series Sirens alongside Julianne Moore, which was also positively reviewed, and later this year is set to lead in a new romantic comedy movie with his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, titled The Best You Can.
Of course, if nothing else comes up, he can always lean back on the phone touting.
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