The Chiseled Charm of Kevin Bacon

The afternoon that Kevin Bacon has planned for the two of us sounds like something out of a Nora Ephron film. We meet in the marbled lobby of his apartment building on Central Park West, where a friendly doorman tips his cap as we leave, take a long amble through Central Park, down a path where Bacon knows the cherry blossoms are in bloom, and end up drinking dirty martinis at the Leopard—the white-tablecloth revamp of Café des Artistes, which served the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Rudolph Valentino. It's all so classic, so swoony, rat-a-tat olde New York, that I start to wonder if Bacon and Ephron ever worked together. They never did, but according to The Oracle of Bacon, a clunky GeoCities-esque website that has, since 1996, been calculating the actor's arterial connections with other actors in Hollywood, they are only three degrees apart (one chain has Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan in between).

When we walk into the Leopard, the maître d' greets him like an old friend. Bacon asks for the table he likes, way in the back, past the elephantine Impressionist murals, past the gleaming oak bar. A server tries to offer him a few other plum tables, but he turns them all down, like a salt-and-pepper Goldilocks. At 61, Bacon radiates a comforting confidence. He's at ease asking for what he wants in the kind of uptight spot that would make most people uneasy.

The Leopard may be a “jackets preferred” establishment, but Bacon arrived as if it were a dive bar, in black jeans, black boots, black leather jacket, and black baseball cap. He's sporting a wild, wiry mustache, grown for his new Showtime series, City on a Hill, a Ben Affleck-produced crime drama set in early-1990s Boston. Bacon stars as Jackie Rohr, a graying, dirty-mouthed FBI agent who could have come straight from a Coen brothers film. City on a Hill is a police show, albeit one that's concerned more with corruption and ambition than abject lawlessness. “Crime is not a big part of this thing,” Bacon says. “This script reminded me of French Connection, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter.”

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The points of comparison may seem lofty, but they signal the kind of complicated characters he wants to be playing. Bacon sees himself exclusively as a character actor. Sure, he starred in Footloose that one time—35 years ago—and it turned him for a moment into a feathered-haired teen idol, but he decided at some point that he had no long-term interest in headlining blockbusters. “A leading man is a man who, it doesn't matter,” he says. “You give him the three Gs, which is the gun, the girl, and the good lighting—that man is going to be eminently watchable. You're going to want to see everything that that person does. That's not me.”

Say what you will of the concept of the “three Gs” (“I made it up, just now,” he says with a grin, when I tell him it's clever), Bacon's notorious ubiquity across three decades in Hollywood is surprising, if only because he's held the place at arm's length for years. He never wanted to live in Los Angeles. And so he and his wife, the actor and director Kyra Sedgwick, who married in 1988, raised their two children, Travis and Sosie, in New York City. Both Bacon and Sedgwick, as he tells me, “defined ourselves” by never going all in on Hollywood, by steering clear of all that.

But as we stood under the cherry blossoms in Central Park, he tells me that they're finally relenting. After decades of resisting, Bacon and Sedgwick have bought a place on the east side of Los Angeles and are spending more time there. Sosie is a working actor in L.A. herself now, and Travis, a black-metal musician, is also moving to California. Perhaps Bacon planned such a cinematic New York day for us because he is trying to capture something that he knows may be slipping away.

We talk a bit about his earliest days as an actor and how his motivations morphed. When he started acting as a teenager, Bacon says, “I was super into being famous and wealthy. And, frankly, I know you hear it all the time, and I know it probably gets a little old, but I really thought that it would be a way to get girls.”

But over time, he realized that the shiny side of celebrity felt empty to him. “What I learned in the long run is that what I love, love, love is the time between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’ ” he says. “I love the work. I mean, I really do. On my worst day, I fucking love it.… If anything, I've never learned to be—what's the word?—cynical about the possibilities for any kind of success around a project. And as a result, I'm often disappointed, you know? People don't like it. It doesn't perform at the box office. It gets canceled after one season. It gets canceled after three seasons. The numbers drop off. The reviews are bad, all these things that can happen. If you look at my career, it's amazing, honestly, that anybody gives me a gig anymore, because I've had a lot of failures. I mean, I've had a few successful things, but I've had way more flops.”

This sort of self-effacement gives short shrift to the huge hits that he's starred in—Mystic River, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13—but it's true that many projects haven't gone as Bacon would have liked. Yet even on the films that flop (Cop Car, anyone?), Bacon brings an essential, almost ineffable Baconness to the screen. It's a quality that, if one was pressed to define it, might be regarded as a mix of ruggedness, hardness, sensitivity, and gee-golly blondness that is all his own. And it's the thing that makes us want to watch him do just about anything: travel to the moon, make mysterious land art in Marfa, or investigate brutal murders in Boston.

The Baconness has somehow seemed to grow more apparent—or more appreciated—recently. In Amazon Studios' I Love Dick, he starred in the titular role, as an eccentric visual artist who becomes an object of erotic fascination, a man to salivate over. His character, a hypermasculine sculptor who swaggers around town in tight Wranglers, was Bacon at his most captivating: surly, gruff, but with an irresistible twinkle in his blue eyes. Bacon loved that project, and he thought it could go places, but it lasted only a season.

It's perhaps part of his charm that he pays no mind to the things he can't control—to things like one's indescribable onscreen essence. He regards himself as a jobber, a yeoman of the trade, who has managed against the odds to simply keep a career simmering on low boil for as long as he has. He plugs along. A steady worker toiling in a fickle field. Sometimes the projects hit, sometimes they don't. Plenty of times, he thinks they really should have. For instance, he recently tried to adapt Tremors, his comedy thriller about giant alien worms in the desert, as a television series for Starz with the producer Jason Blum. “It was great. Trust me,” he says, “it was fucking awesome.” But the network passed.

Bacon has similarly high regard for City on a Hill, the new men-with-badges project that, despite the stereotypically masculine characteristics, is replete with strong female roles. He says that he thought it was important that the women characters on the show were as meaty as his own: “It's not a day and age when we need to be just having macho kind of shit going on.” He asked for there to be women in the writers room, and he insisted that the show bring Sedgwick in as director. “I don't really like being directed by anybody,” he says, “but I love being directed by her. She's so enthusiastic. She's got such a great visual sense.” (He then talked for 20 minutes about Sedgwick's talent. Kevin Bacon, it should be noted, really loves his wife.)

As we finished our martinis, Bacon told me just how excited he is about the opportunities that abound right now for actors. “I went kicking and screaming into television,” he says. “There was a time in my life where if an agent of mine had mentioned a TV series, I would have fired them. I guarantee it.” But now it's where the exciting work is, and so he's gravitated to it. He realizes he is at a point in his life where most people slow down, “spend time fishing or whatever.” But he's not ready to go there yet. “I'm not going to pass judgment on myself of whether that's a good thing or a bad thing,” he says. “But I'm still, like, pedal to the metal.”

Rachel Syme is a writer and cultural critic in New York City.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2019 issue with the title "The Chiseled Charm of Kevin Bacon."

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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Elizaveta Porodina
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Kat Drazen
Makeup by Beate Petruccelli
Set design by Andrea Huelse for Art Department
produced by Vivian Song at Kranky Produktions

Originally Appeared on GQ