The role Kevin Bacon wants to banish to the depths of hell: “I was punching everything”
As you’d expect from an actor with such an unpredictable filmography, Kevin Bacon has dealt with the fiery depths of hell several times during his career, but there’s only one role he wanted to cast into the fire and brimstone, never to be seen or heard from again.
Most recently, he played a murdered bounty hunter who gets resurrected by the devil himself and tasked to hunt demons on Satan’s behalf in The Bondsman, the short-lived TV series that was cancelled after one season, but that was hardly his first brush with the underworld onscreen. In fact, he’s been making a habit of it.
Bacon has dealt with the demonic in several movies, almost all of them terrible. There was a haunted house in the interminable You Should Have Left, a supernatural force in the awful The Darkness, and whatever that CGI monstrosity he was turned into was supposed to be in RIPD, with Stir of Echoes the exception to the rule, and also the star’s favourite film that he’s ever made.
However, when he was asked by the Los Angeles Times which one of his many, many performances he would gladly send to hell, he went back to 1980 and his first-ever recurring role on TV: “Oh god, let’s see, I would say, probably my work on the soap opera, Guiding Light, where I was Tim the teenage alcoholic for a year.”
A seven-episode stint on a soap more than four decades ago doesn’t immediately jump out as one deserving to be buried in the devil’s playground, but Bacon had his reasons. “One of the things is that if you work on a soap opera, if you do something that they like, they’re going to have you do it again and again and again and again,” he explained.
To illustrate his point, he recalled a co-star who was “a really good crier,” so Guiding Light made them cry onscreen every week. As for Bacon, one scene called for him to punch a locker in frustration during an argument with his love interest, which he did so convincingly that it became a key part of his character.
“Well, next week I got a script: ‘Tim punches bookshelf, Tim punches the pillow,'” he recalled. “I was punching everything. In the course of a year, my hand was starting to swell up. I was like, ‘Be careful what you wish for.'” Technically, it was his own fault for being such a good puncher, but after having to do it almost every time he was in an episode, Bacon grew to despise it.
It might sound excessive that a role only the most devoted of Bacon fans will even know he played is the one he’d gladly send spiralling toward eternal damnation, but it’s his career, and he can say whatever he wants. Clearly, being ‘Tim the teenage alcoholic who also enjoys punching everything he can lay his hands on’ wasn’t the greatest experience of his professional life, even if hell seems a step too far.
