(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 17 January 2026 16:15, UK
It’s impressive that Kevin Bacon has managed to remain relevant for as long as he has, considering how he did a stellar job of almost self-sabotaging his career over three decades ago.
While he’s never been able to outrun the lingering, twinkle-toed shadow of Footloose, and he’s gradually come to embrace its enduring cult status, even if he continues paying people to not play Kenny Loggins’ title track when he’s in attendance at weddings or parties, at least he doesn’t hate it like he used to.
Having dreamed of being a respected, serious actor who could effortlessly weave between stage and screen, Bacon instead found himself characterised as a genre guy when his three earliest breakout roles came in Animal House, Friday the 13th, and the aforementioned box office smash.
Most up-and-coming stars would capitalise on playing the lead in a movie that so many people had watched and loved, but not him. Instead, he shunned the mainstream and sought to reinvent himself by turning his hand to smaller-scale projects, more challenging roles, and out of left field choices.
It was admirable, but pretty much all of those films sank without a trace, and most of them were panned by critics. He was staring irrelevancy in the face, and even after a solid 1990 that saw Tremors and Flatliners win plenty of fans, it wasn’t until Oliver Stone’s JFK that the new and improved Kevin Bacon arrived.
No longer interested in being a leading man, he was now a character actor extraordinaire, one who could appear in any picture of any scale and guarantee a solid performance. He solidified his newfound sense of purpose in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, but he still had one foot wedged in each world for the time being.
1994 was a great example. On one hand, he earned a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ by playing the villain opposite Meryl Streep in The River Wild. On the other hand, he took top billing in The Air Up There, a risible comedy about a fading basketball coach who sets off on a mission to Africa to recruit a potential star player for his underperforming squad.
“I just did not feel like things were clicking in terms of the movies, the opportunities I was getting,” he confessed to The Independent of his early-90s malaise. “I did things like The Air Up There, where I went to Africa for three months, missed my daughter’s first birthday, and ended up with another comedy that didn’t work.”
Not only was Bacon stuck in a professional rut, making shitty films he knew would be shitty films from the moment he signed on, but the shoot made him miss his youngest child’s first birthday, filling him with an immediate sense of regret, which would have solidified when he saw how crap The Air Up There was in its finished form.
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