“I was always a little afraid”: the 2013 role Kevin Bacon called “the last thing I wanted to do”
Most actors aren’t in a position to be too precious about the roles they refuse to play, and even though he’s been famous since the 1980s, Kevin Bacon hasn’t always been able to pick and choose his gigs.
He’d be the first to admit that it was his own fault, though, since his desperation to avoid being forever pigeonholed as the Footloose guy saw him shun every mainstream offer that came his way, only to end up staring obsolescence in the face in his early 30s.
Fortunately, Oliver Stone’s JFK was the right movie at the right time, and convinced Bacon that his second act wasn’t as a leading man. He still takes top billing in the occasional production, but for the last three and a half decades, he’s found his niche as a performer who’ll play anyone in almost anything.
That isn’t always for the best, but no matter how high he was flying or how low he was sinking at any given point, there was one thing that he’d never commit to under any circumstances: a TV series. It’s easy to see why, since up until around the turn of the millennium, anyone who considered themselves a movie star or had dreams of becoming one wouldn’t be caught dead on the small screen.
In his earliest days, Bacon appeared in seven episodes of the soap opera Guiding Light, and he hated every second of it. For the next 30 years, he wouldn’t even consider the idea of television until he cottoned on to the fact that a new ‘Golden Age’ had begun, and suddenly, he wanted in.
“People would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a steady gig?'” he explained. “And I’d say, ‘I don’t want a fucking steady gig! I want to do this and go here, and play this guy, and this guy’. It’s part of why I was always a little afraid of television.” He enjoyed the freedom of being a film and theatre actor, but there was another reason why he was terrified of the gogglebox.
“When I started being an actor, the last thing I wanted to do was a TV series,” Bacon admitted. “It might be hard for people to remember, but in the 1970s, when I started, there were TV actors and movie actors; they weren’t the same. I wanted to do stage and movies, but I really didn’t want to do television.”
He was eventually swayed in 2013, when he debuted as former FBI agent Ryan Hardy in The Following, which premiered 32 years after his last recurring role on TV. It lasted three seasons before getting cancelled, and he’s remained open to the notion ever since, although the results have been decidedly mixed.
The crime drama City on a Hill was also axed after three seasons, but I Love Dick and The Bondsman were both canned after a single eight-episode run apiece, so it’s not as if Bacon has suddenly reinvented himself as a doyen of the prestige TV age. At least he’s willing to try, having overcome his career-long aversion to the medium.
