Kevin Bacon talks career, ‘Footloose’ and six degrees

When actor Kevin Bacon began what would be a decades-long career that continues to this day, he had mixed feelings. Especially when garnering fame from hits such as “Footloose.”

“I think that ‘Footloose’ was a really, really great opportunity that I really didn’t know how to use to its best advantage,” Bacon told Tom Tangney on KIRO Radio Wednesday morning.

Bacon took the time to chat in the studio with Tangney wile in Seattle to accept a career achievement award at the Seattle International Film Festival. His newest film “Cop Car” is also screening at the event.

Bacon said that ever since he went to acting school in New York at the age of 17, he had a type of actor in his mind that he wanted to be, but the fame exploding from his earlier films didn’t match that vision.

“I did a lot of off-Broadway, and the people I had admired were not pop stars,” Bacon said. “They were really serious actors…And I had this really big, kind of teen fame, teen following. And I was like, ‘This is not who I want to be at all.'”

“When [Footloose] came out I didn’t really embrace the movie,” he said. “And in a strange way I was kind of rejecting it, because it wasn’t the actor that I wanted to be.”

But that perception has changed over the years. In fact, he starred in a recent revival of his footloose character, Ren, on the Jimmy Fallon Show in honor of the film’s 25th anniversary. The online video recreating his famous warehouse dance scene has since gone viral. The YouTube video has been viewed over 18.5 million times.

“I pitched the ‘Footloose’ idea to them,” Bacon said. “But I had pictured something much simpler. I said, ‘Maybe like it’s us, and I’m trying to teach (Jimmy Fallon) ala ‘Let’s Hear it for the Boy’ in the scene where I’m teaching Chris Penn [how to dance]. Or it’s something with The Roots. And they came back with that massive production, basically recreating this entire thing.”

The “massive production” had Bacon dancing his way through the NBC studios as he once did on the film. He prepared while also shooting his TV series, “The Following.”

“The first thing I had to do was rent the movie, because I didn’t have a copy of it,” Bacon said. “I’m dancing around in my kitchen trying to figure out what I did 25 years ago. I was really overwhelmed.”

It’s not just “Footloose” that Bacon wrestled with when it first came out. The popular game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was also another topic he had to warm up to. Eventually, he realized it was more about human connections, and he used the name for his charity, SixDegrees.org.

“I thought it was a joke at my expense,” he said. “That ‘can you believe that this jackass can be connected to somebody like Meryl Streep or Lawrence Olivier. Believe it or not this guy is connected.'”

“That’s the thing about the life of an actor; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. You always think that you are going to be exposed for the idiot, talentless fool that you are. We are very unsure of ourselves behind this bravado.”

Bacon talks more about the six degrees phenomenon, his career, his show “The Following,” the Seahawks, and his thoughts on acting, especially for new actors in the Tom and Curley Show’s video of the interview.