Kevin Bacon revealed his “worst nightmare” at weddings.
The actor, 66, discussed his more than 40 years in Hollywood during a career retrospective at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on Friday, March 7. During the moderated discussion, Bacon opened up about the very real way in which Footloose from 1984 still impacts his life today, especially at weddings.
“My worst nightmare is to be at a wedding and the DJ puts on the music and the song [Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose”] comes on and suddenly the wedding becomes about me, and people form a circle around me and I become a trained monkey,” Bacon explained. “So I’ve gone to the DJs and said, ‘Please don’t play that song.’ It’s not that I don’t like the song.”
The coming-of-age film tells the story of Ren (Bacon), a teen rebel who moves to a small Southern town that has outlawed dancing for religious reasons. The movie features a number of iconic dance scenes — many of which have become part of the cultural lexicon.
The Mystic River actor went on to share that he didn’t have any formal dance training before getting cast in Footloose.
“The interesting thing about the movie is that I was not a trained dancer,” he said. “Growing up in Philly I loved dancing, in [New York] I would go to Studio 54 and dance all night all alone — and this was when I was a waiter. I always loved it.”
He continued: “But when they sent the script to me I did not know it was a dance movie. They had talked about choreographers [and] I was like, ‘I don’t really need a choreographer. You can just turn the music on and I can just dance around and have fun with it.’ And they were like, ‘Ah — na na na, you don’ know what you’re getting in to.’ “
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And while the role catapulted Bacon to instant fame and heartthrob status, he revealed that he wasn’t comfortable with that specific type of notoriety at the time.
“It was my dream to have my name in lights and sit on the Johnny Carson show with actual Johnny Carson and get to walk a red carpet, but until you really have that you don’t really realize that there is something kind of strange about it,” he said while speaking at the SXSW event.
He added: “Now I am used to it. I had imposter syndrome and I was resistant of it, and I did not want to do press and be on magazines. I wanted to be a serious actor — I did not want to be a pop star. It was the opposite of how I wanted to view myself.”
Shifting to the present, Bacon — who is starring in the supernatural thriller show The Bondsman on Prime Video — shared how he chooses projects, revealing that he has never really had a “career plan.”
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“I guess the first thing is the character and then you start looking at the other pieces of it — director obviously and script and cast and location. I try my best to not think about the size of the budget or the size of the salary or the size of the role. I try to take those three things out of it. I also don’t worry about the size of a part,” he said.
However, he said that despite no formal plan, he always knew he wanted to be an actor.
“I wanted to become an actor before I knew what an actor was,” he told the audience. “When I would walk into a room of family members, or if there was a party I had a strong desire for everyone to look at me. I just knew I wanted the attention. Through the years I realized there was an actual skill set there. But first it was just having as many eyeballs on me as possible.”
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