From the Archives: Kevin Bacon

"As an actor, you're always working for the man. I'm always sitting and waiting for the phone to ring, going in and hoping the guy's going to like me. Then I gotta go and make sure that I'm doing a good job for him. The studio -- I gotta make sure that they're happy. A lot of times, the guys running the studios who are moving up are 25. You got people putting clothes on you and messing with your hair and touching your face with makeup. It can be a strangely emasculating kind of profession, honestly." - Kevin Bacon

"There's a great dichotomy between just being a regular Joe who has this pretty intense thing that he does." Kevin Bacon is talking about his latest role as Tom Witzky, a Chicago blue-collar husband and father who suddenly has the ability to see the dead, in David Koepp's Stir of Echoes. Stretch the statement a bit and he could be describing himself and his versatile career.

Bacon has, after all, run the gamut from Footloose to Wild Things,Tremors to Apollo 13, A Few Good Men to Digging to China, Criminal Law to Murder in the First, J.F.K. to The River Wild. He's done television (Guiding Light) and theater (an Obie-winning turn in Forty-Deuce). He's directed (Losing Chase) and, most recently, formed a band with his brother Michael, appropriately monikered The Bacon Brothers. Of course, there is the board game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which purports that no one is more than six degrees removed from the forty-year-old actor.

Yet for all his successes both professional and personal (he and actress Kyra Sedgwick, his wife of 11 years, have two children), it was Tom Witzky's shortcomings that Bacon could relate to. "I thought that the place where the character was in his life -- struggling with saying goodbye to his dream, struggling with the idea that he was becoming normal -- was an interesting thing to play. When you take that and add on a pretty cool ghost story mystery, that's what I was attracted to."

Bacon continues, "I think that at any point in your life something can open it up and you go through a passage that can shake things up. I also think with that comes hand in hand that moment where you just feel like you're stuck, you're not going anywhere. Ironically, a lot of people still have a hard time believing this, but I was feeling exactly that way when I got the picture. Of course, from the outside, it looks nothing like that," he smiles.

Part of his frustrations stem from the established hierarchy of the business. As an actor, there's only so much of a level you can reach and even at the top of your profession, you can never rest on your laurels. Besides your usual group of competitors, there are the latest hot young things ready to overtake you. "You're never quite there," he muses. "You're always chasing it, chasing something -- there's always somebody that's doing better, there's some list that you're not on, there's always some award that you haven't gotten, or some kind of price tag that you haven't reached. There's always someplace else to be, somewhere else to go. I don't know. Maybe that's the way it is with everybody. I've never really done anything else."

Though Bacon still loves acting, it's the process itself that he's somewhat soured on. He readily acknowledges that acting is regarded as a job where you get paid a lot for doing very little but "the process is definitely work. I think that the days are too long and they're getting longer." Bacon hopes he has enough clout one day to limit the amount of 14-16 hour days he has to put in. "When I first started making movies, it wasn't like that," he remembers. "The days were 12 hours. Now if I have a 12-hour day -- ‘Cool! 12 hours!' That's a sweet day," he smiles.

Bacon, who is in the midst of shooting Paul Verhoeven's special-effects extravaganza The Hollow Man as the invisible titular hero ("The acting takes a back seat."), would like to one day return to the stage. "I don't really get scared making movies, it's a very comfortable place for me to live. There's a danger in doing a play -- every night, it could go wrong. There's a lot of danger there which doesn't really exist in movies, and I find that having some danger is a good thing for one's creative life. It keeps the creative juices flowing, it keeps them on edge."

Thankfully, the Philadelphia native with blue eyes as bright as beacons has his music to give him the butterflies that he doesn't get from acting. The Bacon Brothers are planning on a major national concert and personal appearance tour to promote the release of their second CD, Getting There. "We just kind of put the band together for just one gig and it's taken on a life of its own. I realized how much I enjoyed playing live and I was getting so excited about the performance and being with the audience. There's nothing scarier than standing up and singing a song you wrote about something that's happened to you and exposing yourself in that way."