Happy Birthday, Kevin Bacon! 6 Fun Facts About the ‘Six Degrees’ Inspiration
Kevin Bacon is forever grateful to Footloose for making him a star. But while he might still be synonymous with the 1984 film that launched him, the star, who turns 67 today, has had such a vast film and TV career that he inspired the party game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” which invites players to connect any actor on earth Bacon’s filmography. Though he originally hated the game, Bacon figured out a fine way to own it, parlaying the its appeal into the local empowerment charity SixDegrees.org and a 2024 podcast he called Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon.
That “roll with it” mentality has done well for the actor today. He has moved easily between music, stage, television and feature film projects over the course of his five-decade career (although a day disguised as a “normal person” didn’t suit him too well). He and his wife, actor Kyra Sedgwick, bounced back nicely from being among the infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff’s celebrity victims. Plus, Bacon’s an ace at owning his most embarrassing Hollywood moments and turning them into great stories for the talk show circuit.
And, having initially shrugged off a social media presence, he and Sedgwick discovered Instagram was a welcoming platform to offer glimpses into their lives as loving partners, frequent farmers, talented musicians, and proud parents to their successful grown kids, actress Sosie and musician and composer Travis.
To honor the eternally cool, enviably youthful star — whose most recent projects are the Netflix miniseries Sirens and the Paramount+ creep fest The Bondsman — here are six fun facts about Kevin Bacon.
1 Bacon was in a band when he was 12. You’ll never guess its name.
In a recent interview with Esquire, Bacon briefly revealed he was the drummer in a soul band when he was a preteen. Its name: Footloose.
We know what you’re thinking. A single degree.
2 He actually met Kyra before Lemon Sky
Contrary to most reports, Bacon met his future wife a full decade before they costarred in the PBS telefilm Lemon Sky, an adaptation of the Lanford Wilson play. Sedgwick’s mom was a Bacon fan first. Her daughter, not so much.
“I was doing a lot of off Broadway many years before [Lemon Sky],” Bacon told Drew Barrymore during a recent visit to her talk show. “Her mom had seen me in some plays off Broadway, and she knew that little 12-year-old Kyra wanted to be an actor, and she said ‘There is this actor that I think you should go see’ and got her tickets to a play that I was doing in the Village. In between the matinee and the evening performance — she saw the matinee — I was buying a sandwich in the deli around the corner and this 12-year-old girl came up and said ‘Hi. I liked you in the play.’ According to her, I said ‘Thanks, sweetie‘ … kind of misogynistic.
“She tells the story that, when we first met on Lemon Sky, she said, ‘You know, we met in the Village after that play. Do you remember that?’ She did not like me. It was not love at first sight.”
Bonus fun fact: during a 2013 episode of the popular PBS TV show Finding Your Roots, Sedgwick learned that she and Bacon are also bound by blood. The pair are ninth cousins.
3 He called the Animal House premiere “the worst night of my life”
John Landis plucked Bacon from acting school to appear in Animal House. Because Bacon didn’t have any Hollywood experience, much less an agent, when it came time for the film to premiere, he showed up … and ended up seated with the spectators. Worse, he headed to the premiere party and, he told Howard Stern, because his hair was grown out from his ROTC member crop, “nobody recognized me from the movie.”
“Worst night of my life,” Bacon joked with Stern, adding that he partied with his friends the rest of the night and then headed, a little bit humbled, back to acting school.
> ‘Animal House’ Cast: Who Is Still Alive & Where Are They Now?
4 He appeared on Broadway between Animal House and Footloose
Everett Collection
In 1983, Bacon appeared alongside his fellow future A-listers Sean Penn and Val Kilmer, plus The Bad News Bears alum Jackie Earle Haley and Dream On’s Brian Benben, in the original Broadway production of John Byrne’s Scottish coming-of-age story Slab Boys.
New York Times stage critic Frank Rich thought it was a bit of a stretch for Bacon to go straight from his winning turn as Diner’s spoiled rich kid Fenwick to heavily-accented Scottish bully Phil, but he admired the young actor’s ability to capture his character’s “mixture of yearning, self-pity and rage.”
5 Bacon went ‘undercover’ as a high school kid to prep for Footloose
With permission from the principal, Bacon — then 24 — spent one memorable day as an ‘exchange student’ from Philadelphia at a Provo, Utah, high school. Bacon told The TODAY Show that to mimic his character’s “city kid in a small-town school” circumstance, he decked himself out in spiky hair and a skinny tie. Just like Ren, he landed on the wrong side of his classmates’ goodwill and relied on a sympathetic gentle giant to shield him from tough guys.
“It was so much like the movie,’” Bacon told The TODAY Show hosts, “because a guy came up to me who was a lot like the Chris Penn character, Willard, and said, ‘Don’t worry about them, man, I got you,’ and he kind of befriended me.”
6 He’d revisit one of his characters. But it isn’t Ren.
Everett Collection
Asked in the same TODAY interview if he’d ever consider making a sequel to one of his projects, the avowed horror fan said, “I thought about it a few years back, and the only character with was the guy from Tremors.”
Bacon went on to explain that, while he once disparaged the horror flick as the worst thing he ever did, he came around to the campy film’s appeal. So much so that, he eventually helped the production company Blumhouse repurpose Tremors as a TV show. The pilot didn’t lead to a series, but, Bacon said, “I was really really happy with it, I thought it was super-cool, so that was a disappointment.”
What is your favorite Kevin Bacon role? Let us know in the comments below!
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