“I’ve always dreamed”: the only actor left on Kevin Bacon’s bucket list
Any successful actor who has been in the game for half a century is likely to have managed to work with some, if not most, of the major talents in Hollywood, but Kevin Bacon still has some names to tick off, even after more than 100 movies and making his debut in National Lampoon’s Animal House as far back as 1978.
In terms of directors, Bacon has two leading figures in his sights, one a more modern success and another who has achieved almost unrivalled critical praise in the modern era. The former is Sean Baker, the writer-director of two of the finest movies of the past ten years in the multi-Oscar-winning New York drama Anora and the incredibly affecting The Florida Project from 2017, starring Willem Dafoe.
And then there’s Quentin Tarantino, who Bacon describes as “just amazing”, but has never had the opportunity to work with up to this point. Much as he’s often seen hawking phone contracts on the telly over here, Bacon has actually starred in some of the best-known blockbusters with the most recognised talents in the last 30 years, racking up a genuinely impressive CV of hits including Oliver Stone’s JFK, A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, Mystic River with Sean Penn and the massive space hit Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks back in 1995.
But it has been in his more independent, lower profile performances that Bacon has had most of his critical acclaim, three Golden Globe nominations spread over his career for projects like 2017’s TV series I Love Dick and 1995’s Meryl Streep thriller The River Wild, and his one win came in 2010 thanks to a historical military drama called Taking Chance.
Despite all those Academy Award-winning colleagues over the decades, however, there is one actor that Bacon has never had the honour of appearing alongside, and that is the legendary Denzel Washington. 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.”
Adding, “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.”
There are plenty of links between the two; however, possibly not surprisingly, given the whole ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ thing that was so prevalent on the internet a few years back.
One of Bacon’s most recent movies was the 2023 sci-fi thriller Leave the World Behind, in which he starred alongside Ethan Hawke, who famously appeared opposite Washington in 2001’s Training Day, which won both of them Oscar nominations and a win for Denzel as ‘Best Actor’.
Bacon, meanwhile, has been busy working with his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, making their first on-screen appearance together for 20 years in last year’s romantic comedy The Best You Can, and then again in this year’s upcoming horror Family Movie, which Bacon also directed and features their kids, Travis Bacon and Sosie Bacon.
