The one thing Kevin Bacon refused to do for a role: “No fucking way”
From a terrified teenager at Camp Crystal Lake to an all-powerful mutant battling the X-Men to a young man trying to bring dancing back to a small town, Kevin Bacon has lived many lives on screen.
The well-connected actor has been a staple of the movies since he made his first appearance as an extra in National Lampoon’s Animal House in the late 1970s. He’s been in dramas, comedies, horrors, sci-fi epics, and small-scale dramas, and he is usually great at whatever he does. Sometimes, though, even an actor of Bacon’s calibre will be met with a task they simply do not want to do.
In 1999, Bacon appeared in David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes. A supernatural horror, the film follows Bacon’s character, Tom Witzky, as he deals with a series of visions brought on by hypnosis. To reflect on the movie’s 25th anniversary, Bacon and Koepp sat down with Variety, where the director revealed that he had personally been hypnotised to gain a better insight into the practice. Bacon probably should have done the same to play the part, but he was having none of it.
“Very uncharacteristically for me, I said, ‘no fucking way,’” the actor admitted. “I don’t like that idea of somebody being in control of me. I just had a really bad association with it.” However, despite some initial resistance, Bacon did eventually come around to the idea.
“Over time, I started to meditate, and I started to think about hypnosis as a mode of therapy,” he added. “Not only did I find it beneficial, but they say that there are people who are, for whatever reason, open to it – and I’m completely open. I’ve continued to do self-hypnosis, and stuff like that has become a part of my life, but at the time, when I was in that movie, I was like, ‘Nah, not for me.’”
Speaking on his own experiences with hypnosis, Koepp admitted that he was somewhat underwhelmed with the procedure. “I had an experience that was not as deep as I would hope, but I did go into a state of very deep concentration,” he said. “I remember when I was under, he [the hypnotist] had me go into a room, and it was a very pleasant book-lined study, and there was a fire burning and a comfortable chair. And I sit down, and there’s a pad of paper, and I pick up a pen, and he said, ‘Write something and fold the paper over.’”
Koepp, best known for having penned the screenplays for Mission: Impossible, Carlito’s Way, and Jurassic Park, then related what happened next: “He had me unfold the paper and read what I’d written – in my mind, not in reality – and I had written, ‘You’re kidding yourself.’ And I don’t know what that meant exactly. I’ve been trying to figure it out for 25 years.”
Stir of Echoes, Koepp’s third directorial effort, also stars Illeana Douglas, Kevin Dunn, and Jennifer Morrison. One night at a party, phone engineer Witzky challenges his ghost-obsessed sister-in-law Lisa (Douglas) to send him to the astral plane. When she does, his life changes irreversibly, as he is haunted by visions of what lies on the other side. It underperformed at the box office, possibly because it was released close to M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, which shared many of the same themes.
