Kevin Bacon Decided It ‘Sucks’ to Not Be Recognized After Wearing Prosthetics: ‘I Want to Go Back to Being Famous’
Kevin Bacon has no desire to go back to living a normal life.
The iconic actor, who has been in Hollywood for decades, told Vanity Fair that he went undercover with fake teeth, a prosthetic nose, and glasses to feel how it was to not be famous for a day. Turns out, he didn’t enjoy it.
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“I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable,” Bacon said. “Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent. [So] I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations, and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise.”
Bacon went to The Grove shopping mall in Beverly Hills while in his disguise. There, he was treated just like any other shopper.
“Nobody recognized me,” Bacon said. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.'”
The “MaXXXine” also recently transformed onscreen for his role in Ti West’s trilogy ender.
“Ti is the type of person and director who is confident enough to be comfortable collaborating, so we started banging around some ideas. He wanted me to go as far as possible, and I like taking big swings,” he said of his campy turn as a private investigator for the horror film. “He said to me, in no uncertain terms, ‘If we go too far, I’m going to protect you and I’ll be able to pull it back. If we go too far with the look, if we go too far with the dialect, or even with the performance.’ So I trusted him.”
Bacon added that he had to “fight back” against being typecast earlier in his career, especially after his star-making turn in “Footloose.”
“Becoming the kind of actor who has an opportunity to take big swings was a very difficult thing to attain in this industry, because Hollywood wants you to do the same thing that you did last time [a project of yours] made money. When I did ‘Quicksilver,’ the next movie that I did after ‘Footloose,’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to do another dance movie. I want to do a gritty bike movie.’ And in the course of doing the movie, all of a sudden they added a dance sequence on bikes,” he said. “So you have to really fight back against that, and find people who are interested in you taking a big swing. But at this point, I don’t get a lot of pushback on the choices that I make.”
He cited Oliver Stone’s “JFK” as a particular past role that undercut his public persona in a good way.
“Because of ‘Footloose’ and the movies that I was doing, the way I was perceived was very much like a pop star. I don’t even know what you’d call it — a boy/leading man type thing,” Bacon said. “So I went in and Oliver said basically the same thing Ti said: ‘Will you go for it?’ I said ‘sure.’ The next thing I know, I’m down in Louisiana, hanging out in these pretty hardcore leather bars. And then I’m up at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, being met by the warden, going to spend time with the inmates there. It was great. And when the movie came out, my career changed overnight, literally. People were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t really know that you could do that.'”
He continued, “The film industry, sadly, is a very isolating and hierarchical kind of business. There’s this underlying feeling that we need to be competing with each other. There’s this whole thing about what’s number one at the box office. All of this shit, like the size of your trailer or salaries. . .it’s all hierarchical bullshit. So wherever I can feel like I’m a member of a community that is supporting each other in creating these things that I think are super important, I want to do that.”
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