Kevin Bacon has daydreamed about walking through life as a regular, nonfamous person. A person who hasn’t been killed onscreen by Meryl Streep (in A River Wild), gone to space with Tom Hanks (Apollo 13), or sat across the courtroom from Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson (A Few Good Men). A person so unubiquitous that there is no parlor game named for and centered around him. A person who could stroll the Earth for a day without being asked for a selfie by a stranger.
Then Bacon realized he could test out his fantasy by donning a disguise. And not just any old costume-shop purchase. “I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable,” Bacon explains on a recent Zoom. “Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent.”
So the Golden Globe–winning actor and musician went a step further. “I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations, and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise,” Bacon says.
He was outfitted with fake teeth, a slightly different nose, and glasses—a getup that made Bacon look a lot like his character in the new Ti West horror film MaXXXine, a sleazy private detective hired to track down the title character (Mia Goth). Bacon put on his normal-person camouflage and tested it at one of the most densely populated locations in Los Angeles: an outdoor shopping mall called The Grove that is perpetually full of tourists.
To his initial delight, the disguise really worked. “Nobody recognized me,” he says. But then an unfamiliar sensation washed over Bacon: the feeling of being invisible. (Given the actor’s prolific career, it is unsurprising that Bacon has played invisible—in 2000’s Hollow Man—but that was for an audience.)
At the Grove, Bacon recalls, “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”
When he’s onscreen, though, Bacon loves disappearing completely into a character. That much is clear in MaXXXine, the third film in West’s horror series. Bacon fully basks in his character’s sleaziness, delivering sinister lines in full Louisiana accent. (A sampling: “The past ain’t done with you, Maxine.”) The film bows on Friday, the same week that the actor appears in a movie on the other end of the genre spectrum: the Eddie Murphy action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. (Murphy proclaimed Bacon “the perfect villain” for the franchise.)
“I honestly feel very grateful for where I happen to be,” Bacon tells VF in a wide-ranging conversation. “That I can have two totally different movies coming out within a couple of days of each other, and completely different roles. The fact they would both come my way is the thing that I feel the most gratitude for. I’ve fought really long and hard for it.”
Ahead of his double premiere week, the actor looks back on the time his career literally changed overnight, reveals one of his only regrets, and shares how he tries to combat Hollywood’s “hierarchical bullshit.”
Vanity Fair: In MaXXXine you play a detective with a thick New Orleans accent who wears white linen suits and a mustache, and drinks Bloody Marys. How did the character come together?
Kevin Bacon: Ti is the type of person and director who is confident enough to be comfortable collaborating, so we started banging around some ideas. . .He wanted me to go as far as possible, and I like taking big swings. He said to me, in no uncertain terms, “If we go too far, I’m going to protect you and I’ll be able to pull it back. If we go too far with the look, if we go too far with the dialect, or even with the performance. . .” So I trusted him.
Becoming the kind of actor who has an opportunity to take big swings was a very difficult thing to attain in this industry, because Hollywood wants you to do the same thing that you did last time [a project of yours] made money. When I did Quicksilver, the next movie that I did after Footloose, I was like, “I don’t want to do another dance movie. I want to do a gritty bike movie.” And in the course of doing the movie, all of a sudden they added a dance sequence on bikes.
So you have to really fight back against that, and find people who are interested in you taking a big swing. But at this point, I don’t get a lot of pushback on the choices that I make.
Was JFK (in which Bacon played a hustler) your turning point in terms of taking big swings?
Yes. The meeting that I had with [writer/director] Oliver [Stone] on JFK and the meeting that I had with Ti were strangely similar. The difference was that Ti had movies to look at of mine where he could see that I was willing to do this kind of transformational stuff. But Oliver [didn’t have] a lot of stuff like that [to] reference.
Because of Footloose and the movies that I was doing, the way I was perceived was very much like a pop star. I don’t even know what you’d call it—a boy/leading man type thing. So I went in and Oliver said basically the same thing Ti said: “Will you go for it?” I said “sure.” The next thing I know, I’m down in Louisiana, hanging out in these pretty hardcore leather bars. And then I’m up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, being met by the warden, going to spend time with the inmates there. It was great. And when the movie came out, my career changed overnight, literally. People were like, “Oh, I didn’t really know that you could do that.”
You’ve never seemed reluctant to play a really dark character, and have played people who have done some pretty terrible things onscreen—to women, children, animals. Have any roles you’ve been offered given you pause?
No, not really, because to me, this is what an actor is. I’m never worried about how people feel about me. Work is about becoming other people and becoming part of some story. I don’t need you to go to a movie and love me. If you go to a movie like MaXXXine or Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and I die and you stand up and cheer, I’m like, “Great. That was my gig. That’s what I wanted out of it.”
You’ve said Jack Nicholson was a role model to you because of his fearlessness in playing unlikable parts. Did you get a chance to talk to him about that while making A Few Good Men?
I never did ask Jack about that. In that particular situation, I was on the other side of the courtroom, and we weren’t really interacting that much offscreen at all. I will tell you that seeing him come to work and do what he did, take after take, was completely inspirational and mind blowing and fantastic. Just to be in the orbit of someone that I had admired so much.
When you look at Jack, it’s not like he got old enough and started to get a chance to play unlikeable characters, whatever that means. He was there right out of the gate. He had no problem with it, and I think that's great.
Looking back, and I don't look back that much frankly. . .but if I ever could have given some advice to a younger person, it would be to pick people’s brains who have more experience than you. I just didn’t do that. I thought I knew everything there was to know about everything. I was never looking for any kind of mentorship or advice, either from actors or people who had more experience than me. I didn’t have that gene. I was cocky and headstrong and determined.
You grew up with a famous father, though he wasn’t an actor. He was an important urban planner in Philadelphia who was on the cover of Time. Was fame something that you consciously wanted for yourself growing up?
A hundred percent. In terms of giving credit to my parents, and course I give all the credit to them, my mother was very much on the artistic side and really encouraged acting. My brother was a musician, but in general, amongst the six of us [children], they both encouraged as much creativity as possible in everything—dance, music, theater, painting, sculpture, whatever.
My father was famous in Philadelphia, which in some ways is a small pond, but for me it was a big pond. I saw him get recognized by people when he would walk down the street and seeing that was definitely a big driving force in my life. Frankly, I wanted to be more famous than him. And you can lay me down on the shrink’s couch. We could talk about that for a while. But it was definitely a motivator.
Your wife, Kyra Sedgwick, is also an actor, and your daughter Sosie is one as well. She asked you for help on her Philadelphia accent ahead of filming Mare of Easttown. Does she ask you for advice?
Interestingly, for many years, because she wasn’t an actress, she really did not ask for advice. Neither one of our kids really has asked us for advice about much of anything. Our son is a musician and a composer, and he’s actually getting into some filmmaking now.
When our daughter went into movies, that changed. Not about everything, but now we can have exchanges and conversations about the process of acting, and the process of career and agents and managers and auditions and deals, and all the other junk that we go through. She will send auditions [to us], and my wife is very much a director. She can be extremely helpful. Usually, my first response is, “If they don’t give you this part, they’re fucking idiots.” I always think that every audition that she does is like a swish.
Actors usually leave the horror genre behind after getting to a certain place in their careers but, four decades after your role in Friday the 13th, you’re still here. What keeps you coming back?
I’m a consumer of horror. I think that it’s always been discounted as a serious genre. You’re never going to see people—or maybe it’s starting to change—go up and accept an award for a horror movie. There was a moment in the seventies, with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, The Shining, and Don’t Look Now where it was starting to go in that direction. I think people were appreciating those.
And then, in the eighties—and I had something to do with this—you had the birth of the slasher movie. And all of a sudden they were thought of as cheap pieces of junk. Once you got out of horror, you’d never get back into it. Now, I love them. I don’t love ’em all. . .The other thing about it, as an actor, is a lot of times it’s a life and death situation. The stakes are very high, so you get great stuff to play.
At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about reaching out to Ti. Are you still as proactive and competitive about roles at this point in your career?
Yes, I am still hungry, and I still feel like the best work is in front of me. I don’t think it’s a competition—it’s a competition with myself. I probably did this in the past, but I’m not looking at this actor going, “I wish I was him” or “I wish I had what he had.”
When I reach out to people, it’s not because I’m trying to get a gig. It's because I feel like being appreciated for what you do as an artist from somebody else is a nice feeling. If there’s somebody that I admire that comes up and says, “Hey, I really like that” or “you did a good job,” it feels good.
The film industry, sadly, is a very isolating and hierarchical kind of business. There’s this underlying feeling that we need to be competing with each other. There’s this whole thing about what’s number one at the box office. All of this shit, like the size of your trailer or salaries. . .it’s all hierarchical bullshit. So wherever I can feel like I’m a member of a community that is supporting each other in creating these things that I think are super important, I want to do that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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