Kevin Bacon

To Kevin Bacon in Flatliners! —me, playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

I am, I don’t mind telling you, a whiz at the Kevin Bacon game. This is helped by having, as a friend puts it, an IMDb in my brain. I can also tell you that the secret is what I call “hub movies,” which are movies with enormous casts. You can get to an awful lot of people through any given MCU movie, especially now that Kevin Bacon the person is in the MCU, but what I used to use in college was Dune and American Graffiti and things like that. Altman movies are helpful, too—Julia Roberts was in an Altman film and is in Flatliners and that’s going to hook you up with quite a lot of people. I can tell you, though, that using Finding Your Roots is cheating, even if you can now connect to probably literally everyone through just that show.

Why Kevin Bacon? I strongly suspect it goes back to Animal House. (Which gets you John Belushi, Donald Sutherland—himself a connection to Altman—and Tom Hulce, among others.) It’s a huge cast. Bacon wasn’t the stand-out in it, but goodness knows that’s a difficult task in a Belushi movie. He’d then go into Diner, where he was a much bigger deal. (Which gets you Paul Reiser, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, and others.) Even the classic Footloose gets you John Lithgow, Dianne Weist, and Sarah Jessica Parker. Bacon does not have a ton of starring roles, but he’s in a lot of movies where you recognize most of the cast.

The fact is, Kevin Bacon is an icon. There’s a reason he’s Star Lord’s Christmas present from his friends. He apparently resigned himself in about 1991 to the fact that he was never going to be a star. He wanted to work in high-end productions with A-list directors, and he knew he wasn’t going to do that as a star. So the short answer to “why Kevin Bacon?” is that he’s one of the most noteworthy character actors of his generation. The question is not “why Kevin Bacon?” so much as it is “who would it have been if we weren’t looking at late-generation Boomers?”

And that is genuinely an interesting question. I think we cover a lot of people for this column who fit into the category of “character actor,” but how many of them from the pair of columns are the Kevin Bacon of their era? Kevin Bacon is Kevin Bacon because his career was what it was at exactly the right moment to create the meme, and if the idea had come a few years earlier or a few years later, it might have been someone else. I will say that Kevin Bacon has a fairly high percentage of genuine classics in his character actor history.

He seems fairly mellow on the subject, though apparently he used to resent it. All in all, Bacon seems to be a decent guy; after all, he was willing to appear in “The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special” in the first place. He was willing to look at how easy it was to be sexist as a character and recognize it as a symptom of sexism in himself, which I appreciate. He and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick (Bacon number one, of course, but also ninth cousins once removed), have worked together to further progressive causes. He’s a musician, performing in The Bacon Brothers with, naturally, his brother Michael, as well as Old 97’s. Also he has a podcast called Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon, Gods bless him.