E-mail a friendKevin Bacon
airdate January 11, 2005
Actor Kevin Bacon's body of work includes an extensive range of supporting characters and starring roles. The Philadelphia native began his career on the New York stage and made his film debut in Animal House. His turn as a rebel dancer in Footloose was a breakthrough role. Equally skilled at comedy and drama, Bacon alternates between the stage and screen. He added director to his skill set with Losing Chase and, along with his older brother, has a successful country-folk rock band, The Bacon Brothers.
Kevin Bacon
Tavis: Kevin Bacon is a terrific actor whose movie résumé tells the tale of a remarkable career in Hollywood, and this guy is just getting started. Films like 'Diner,' 'Footloose,' 'Animal House,' 'Apollo 13,' 'JFK,' 'A Few Good Men,' and 'Mystic River' just to name a few. The latest movie starring Kevin Bacon is 'The Woodsman.' The notable cast of this film includes his beautiful wife Kyra Sedgwick, Mos Def, Eve, and Benjamin Bratt. Here now, more about 'The Woodsman.'
Sgt. Lucas: Sit down!
Walter: You can't talk to me...
Sgt. Lucas: Like what? We need to make sure that you're being a good boy, Walter, OK?
Walter: OK.
Mary Kay: So, what did he do? Drugs, armed robbery?
Bob: Mind your business, Mary Kay.
Sgt. Lucas: Throw you out that window right now.
Vickie: Hey!
Sgt. Lucas: Think somebody's gonna miss you?
Walter: Why do you stay?
Vickie: I see something in you, something good. You don't see it yet, but I do.
Sgt. Lucas: I don't know why they keep lettin' freaks like you out on the street. It just means we gotta catch you all over again.
Walter: I'm not a monster.
Tavis: Kevin Bacon, nice to meet you.
Kevin Bacon: Nice to meet you, man.
Tavis: Glad to have you on. Um...I'm trying to figure out where I want to go with this. I think where I wanted to start is to ask you why an actor decides to choose to play what I can only assume is like the lowest of the lowest of the lowest of characters, the scum of the earth. I mean, you're really at the bottom of the barrel here when one agrees to play a sex offender, and then a sex offender of kids.
Bacon: Right.
Tavis: As an actor, why even go there?
Bacon: Uh, I became an actor so that I could be different kinds of people, I could express the varying examples of the human condition, and I like to, you know, challenge myself. Uh, I don't, you know, drive in fast cars and jump out of airplanes on the weekends, you know?
Tavis: You just sing a lot.
Bacon: I sing a lot, but I live a very kind of safe, you know, and kind of boring kind of life. But when it comes to my work, I like to, uh, I like to take risks, and the struggle of this guy to get well, uh, I found compelling.
Tavis: Can--I'm not looking for a clinical answer here. I recognize that you're an actor, not a physician in this regard. But from having played this character, you think that a sex offender can-- to use your phrase--get well?
Bacon: I don't think there's-- My sense is that there's maybe no such thing as a cure. Uh, that being said, I think we have to continue to look for ways that people can get into situations so that they don't re-offend. I'm not exactly sure what that is, what kind of help that is, and I don't know if the movie really is even putting it out there, has any suggestions. But, you know, an alcoholic, um, may not drink for the rest of his life, but he's still gonna be an alcoholic, and it's gonna be something that he's gonna have to work on every single day. I think that at the end of the movie, there is hope that at least this character has acknowledged and accepted his problem and has accepted the fact that it's gonna take a lot of work, but that the alternative is--is--is worse.
Tavis: Yeah. Our producer Holly and I were talking before we came out here, and what's scary, I think, for both of us, is that we're watching a film--I mean, it speaks to what a great actor you are, and I'm not trying to, you know, brown-nose--I'm just saying that it's scary for us to watch you play a sex offender of young girls and to have you actually impact us and get us to pause for a moment and to see that this guy did have another side, that he wasn't necessarily a monster. Bad, bad, bad boy to be sure. Um, but you succeeded in getting us to see that this guy did have another side to his life. I wonder whether or not, you know, you think that that will resonate with the American movie viewer-- moviegoer? I mean, it worked with Holly and me, but who-- who are we?
Bacon: Well, it's not gonna be 'Lord of the Rings,' you know.
Tavis: It won't be 'Lord of the Rings.' OK.
Bacon: But, uh, I knew that going in. I just wanted to make the guy a human being. To me, in some ways, that's a much more frightening concept than the fact that you label somebody a monster. Because if these guys really were monsters, then we could send out superheroes wearing, you know, capes and tights and stuff, and they would be able to pick out the monsters and, you know, take care of them, take care of the problem. But the fact is that these are--there's a lot of-- this is a really widespread problem, and these guys are in our schools, in our churches, on the bus, you can't pick them out in a crowd. They're human beings. That to me is a much more frightening notion. So, I just wanted to make him, um, as real as possible. And as I read the script, I went through a whole series of kind of conflicting emotions about how I felt about this guy, this character.
Tavis: You have kids?
Bacon: I got 2 kids. Yeah, I'm a father, and I have extremely strong feelings about this, and I agree with you that it is the most heinous of crimes. I just hope that as an actor and as--collectively as filmmakers, we can make a movie that would at least, uh, spark a discussion and, um--and put this issue out there. Because I think as long as we keep kind of sweeping it under the rug, we're never gonna come up with any kind of solutions.
Tavis: All right. So we're having a conversation, indeed we are having a conversation on national television about this right now. What do you want us to talk about with regard to this issue?
Bacon: Well, what do you do with someone who is a convicted sex offender when they get out of prison?
Tavis: Mm-hmm.
Bacon: You know, how do we deal with this issue, and instead of putting the onus on our kids to fix it by saying, you know, look out, don't talk to anybody, scream no, kick the guy, you know. All those things are important, too, but we really have to deal with these guys in terms of keeping them from not re-offending. I think it's also important to get people talking about it. I mean, I've talked to people who have said to me, you know, 'My uncle, you know, it turns out--' not my own uncle, but a friend of mine told me that his uncle, it turns out, you know, had some issues with this, and that one of his children was, you know, confused and thinking and starting to have these feelings. So people need to be looking out for that and stopping it and nipping it in the bud, you know? It's gotta be discussed and dealt with.
Tavis: A recidivism issue is a tricky one, though. An issue of people repeating over and over.
Bacon: Yeah, well, it's a cycle.
Tavis: Yeah. You said something a moment ago that got my attention, Kevin. You very courageously and with total veracity said, 'This is not gonna be ‘Lord of the Rings'.' I mean, I get your point. You've done some 'Lord of the Rings' type stuff, though, in that you've done and been a part of a number of blockbusters. Why at this point, or for that matter, any point in your career when you could do blockbuster stuff, choose to do stuff like this that you know isn't going to be, as you said, 'Lord of the Rings'?
Bacon: You know, I've always gone back and forth from independent films to mainstream films. I've always just--you know, I don't want to just be the hero, you know? It's just not interesting to me.
Tavis: You don't want to be the hero? See, I kinda like being the hero. Of course, I've never been the hero in nothin', either. So I like the idea of being the hero.
Bacon: It's not satisfying to me, you know? I mean, I want to push the envelope. But I want to go places that I haven't gone before, you know, as an actor.
Tavis: Yeah. I mentioned earlier that--on the weekends, to your point, you're not jumping out of balloons or off of cliffs and crazy stuff like that--over buses on motorcycles. But you do a lot of singin'.
Bacon: Yes, my brother and I have a band.
Tavis: The Bacon Brothers.
Bacon: The Bacon Brothers.
Tavis: How's that comin' along?
Bacon: It's comin' really well. We have, you know, did quite a bit of touring this year. I was able to kind of fit it in in-between the movies that I've been doin'. And we've done 3 studio records and a live record that we put out last year. So I think probably this spring, we're gonna try and get back in the studio again. 'Cause, you know, I'm a pretty prolific writer, and my brother's written a bunch of stuff recently, too. So we feel like we've got an album worth of songs and it's time to play 'em down.
Tavis: What came first, your love of the music or your love of the acting?
Bacon: I really--when I was a little kid, I mean, my heroes were all guys with guitars. I started goin' to rock shows when I was a tiny, tiny little boy because a buddy of mine's father was a rock promoter. And, you know, I grew up, you know, wanting to be, you know, the Beatles and the Stones and Marvin Gaye. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is a very heavy, you know, kind of music town. I wrote songs before I ever took an acting class. But my brother is older than me, 9 years older than me, and by the time I was starting to decide what I was gonna do with my life, you know, about 13 years old or so, he was already off on a music career, and so I said, 'Well, he's doin' that,' you know, 'I'm gonna take an acting class,' and I fell in love with acting, and, you know, my life just took a different path.
Tavis: Yeah. What does the music give you, and what does the acting give you? What does it do for Kevin Bacon?
Bacon: Well, you know, music is a magical, magical thing. There is a feeling of a true kind of collaboration and camaraderie that happens with a group of musicians that I've rarely kind of felt in the movie business. As much as I love the movie business, I think it's in a lot of ways a very kind of isolating medium. You know what I mean? But, you know, if you're playing with musicians, it's got a groove. You know, the drummer has to be playing with the bass player who has to be playing with the singer who has to be playing with the guitar player.
Tavis: But I guess an ensemble cast kinda has to work the same way, though, doesn't it, a little bit?
Bacon: It does. But I think that--but my experiences of really feeling like an ensemble have been few or far between. Because I think that what happens in the movies, even in the technical side of movie-making, you know, when we were doin' this as a movie, we'd shoot this over here and do a 2-shot, and then we'd start putting hardware in between us as we started to do the coverage and till it's final, like, the cameras are right here, and I'm, like, 'Hey, Tavis, I'm over here.' You know what I mean? You feel very kind of separated, and I think what happens is you start goin', you know, 'How do I look in my close-up?' And, you know, you stop playing the play. I did a lot of stage work when I started out, and at those times, I felt sort of more of an ensemble, more of a community. But the other thing about music for me, and this is also another reason why I love acting. I love to be an actor to become somebody else, you know, to become Walter in 'The Woodsman' or whoever it is. You know, to go to prison, to go to the moon, to go, you know, whatever I've done, you know?
Tavis: Mm-hmm.
Bacon: Musically, it's my clothes. They're my words. It's my guitar. It's my life. It's a much more kind of--it's much closer to Kevin in terms of kind of self-expression. I've always said to people, you know, I'll do countless interviews and say, 'Well, tell us about the real you.' I say, 'You know, just read the lyrics of the songs, you know, everything you want to know about me.
Tavis: I won't ask you that question, then. I'll just read the lyrics to your songs.
Bacon: Yeah.
Tavis: I won't ask that. But you did say something--before I let you out of here--you said something a moment ago that again got my attention. Your brilliant, although brief, dissertation on cinematography was fascinating to me because it reminded me that you're not just an actor, you're not just a bandleader. But you're also a director as well. So how do you bounce between directing and acting, and does it make it more difficult for you, to the point you made a moment ago, given that you are a director, to stay focused on the role when, in the back of your mind, you may be thinkin' about the shot, about the angle, about...
Bacon: Well, I mean, sometimes, it's hard for me to keep my mouth shut. There are certain things that--
Bacon: There are certain things you can't do.
Tavis: Right.
Bacon: But I don't think it's fair to start to direct the actors that you're in the scene with. And every once in a while, I'll be just, 'Maybe you could just--' I can't say it. But in terms of the camera angles and the other aspects, I really love to give myself over to a director. I've had amazing directors that I've been able to put myself in their hands. But honestly, if there's something that I think could be benefited by, you know, a shot that we didn't get, or, you know, the fact that, you know, I feel like I could use another take or 'Are you sure you got this?' Or 'Wouldn't it be nice?' You know, I'll speak up. I mean,
Tavis: Right.
Bacon: So I feel like it should be a collaboration.
Tavis: You got something to share.
Bacon: Yeah, I got something to share.
Tavis: We probably should go right quick. Anything you want to share with Jonathan X, our director? Anything that you want to-- Our director? Anything you want to share with him right quick?
Bacon: Uh, yeah. You know, I think you're doing a great job, but I think you should've stayed with the money a little more often. Yeah.
Tavis: And there you have it. Thank you, Jonathan. That's our show for tonight. Kevin, nice to meet you. I'm--ha ha ha! See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles. As always, keep the faith.
Back to January 11, 2005