Kevin Bacon: Bacon Bounces Back

"Let me put it this way. The most challenging work and the best work I've ever done was in a thing I did for PBS called Lemon Sky, a play by Lanford Wilson."

"And your wife, Kyra Sedgwick, was in it. Coincidence?"

"Well, I met her while I was doing it," he says, then suddenly bristles. "Hey, I don't need to get my wife gigs!"

"That's not what I meant," I say. Kyra, after all, has Born on the Fourth of July and Singles on her resume. "I just thought perhaps it was your favorite work because your wife is in it."

"No, that has nothing to do with it," he says. "I think it's the rawest, most complex work that I've had to do, and the thing I'm most proud of. And--fitting into the strange irony of my life--it's the thing that probably the least number of people have seen!" He laughs.

"I haven't, for example," I say.

"What time is it, by the way? I have to call the gang." He looks at my watch and sees that it's 9:15. "I'll call later, after they're in bed."

While we're eating dinner," I say, "let's go over all your movies and mine them for anecdotes."

"Anecdotes?" he says, horrified. "I've got, like, 20 movies!"

"Twenty-three, to date."

"You'll have to name the movies then, 'cause I can't."

"National Lampoon's Animal House," I begin.

"I know that's the first one--right? They cast me straight out of acting school. I went for this goofy audition for this movie, and then I forgot all about it. I'm living in this two-room shit-hole with another guy in a welfare hotel at 85th and Broadway. Then, months later, they called me up and said they wanted me to do some movie for scale.

Honestly, I not only didn't know how much scale was, I didn't know what the fuck it was. At that point, I think it was, like, $785 a week. Man, when I found that out...!"

"That was a lot?"

"Oh. My. God," he says. "It was incredible! But they needed me out there the day after tomorrow. I had to get on a plane the next day. So I was flown first class to San Francisco, stayed in a hotel overnight...Man, I was in seventh fucking heaven."

"I guess you knew then that you'd chosen the right career?"

"Oh yeah. I'd been on a couple of flights before, but I'd never flown first class. I couldn't believe you didn't have to pay for a beer in first class, couldn't believe it. I take out my script and start reading it, hoping the stewardesses will notice. By the way," he says with a grin, "this story has no punchline."

"I don't care. It's a cute story. Next: Starting Over?"

"Alan Pakula cast me in the film and I was completely thrilled, but you have to watch very quickly. I think I'm buying furniture in Bloomingdale's when Burt Reynolds needs a Valium."

"Tell me again how they put that arrow through your neck in Friday the 13th."

"Fake neck and chest," he says. "I had to be on my knees underneath the bed with two other guys; one's got the arrow, the other's got the blood pump. The thing is that, because of the budget, they're only gonna do this gig once; they can't afford to build another neck for take two. So it takes forever to set it up; my position was really starting to hurt, but I wasn't allowed to move. Finally, the guy pokes the arrow through and the blood thing breaks, so he blows the blood through the tube so it looks like it's spurting.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to act like I'm dying--but nobody had thought about that, so I get a big mouthful of the blood. An hour later, my tongue's tingling, right? So then the special-effects guy tells me the blood's a mixture of food coloring, Karo syrup and developing fluid, so maybe I'd better rinse my mouth out. That movie was a nightmare."

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