Kevin Bacon’s “worst nightmare” entails certainly one of his most iconic film roles.
Whereas reflecting on his profession throughout a panel on the South by Southwest Movie Competition in Austin, Texas, the 66-year-old actor spoke about “Footloose,” the 1984 movie that put him on the map, and the way the long-lasting title track from the musical drama continues to hang-out him greater than 40 years after its launch.
”My worst nightmare is to be at a marriage and the DJ places on the music and the track comes on and abruptly the marriage turns into about me, and other people type a circle round me and I turn out to be a educated monkey,” Bacon defined. “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 track “Footloose,” co-written and recorded by Kenny Loggins for the movie, is performed within the ultimate scene of the film, and went on to obtain a greatest unique track nomination on the 1985 Academy Awards.
The movie stars Bacon as Ren McCormack, a young person who strikes from Chicago to a small Midwestern city, the place he’s shocked to seek out out that dancing and rock music have been made unlawful. Though “Footloose” options many dance scenes, Bacon admits he “was not a trained dancer” going into it.
©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Assortment
“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 informed the SXSW crowd.
Bacon 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’t know what you’re getting in to.’”
In April 2024, Bacon returned to the Utah highschool the place the film was filmed, following a social media marketing campaign began by the scholars of Payson Excessive.
The marketing campaign included movies of the scholars re-enacting scenes from the movie and posting them on-line with the hashtag #bacontopayson.
A video posted by Salt Lake Metropolis’s ABC 4 on the time confirmed the actor joking that “things look a little different around here. I’d say the thing that looks the most different is me.”
“When I first heard about this ‘Bacon to Payson’ thing, I was like ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ But you were all just tireless. Unrelenting… You talked me into it,” he mentioned. “I think it’s great to see that kind of commitment to anything.”
After the success of “Footloose,” Bacon continued starring in profitable motion pictures, together with “Mystic River,” “Apollo 13,” “A Few Good Men,” “Frost/Nixon” and lots of others.
Through the panel, the veteran actor additionally defined that “it was my dream to have my name in lights” and to take a seat with Johnny Carson on his speak present, however when he lastly achieved these goals, he “realize[d] that there is something kind of strange about it.”
“Now I am used to it. I had impostor syndrome and I was resistant of it, and I did not want to do press and be on magazines,” Bacon continued. “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.”
