Actor Kevin Bacon may have rated high on the sigh-scale as the interloper in “Footloose” a few years ago, but it didn’t do much for him.
Bacon, who has starred as such films as “Diner,” “Flatliners” and the new “The Air Up There,” didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.
“I think I felt as though, looking back that somehow, for whatever reason, I was undeserving of whatever was coming to me,” he says. “Even though I’d already been an actor for five or six years and had worked as a waiter and so on, I still didn’t feel I deserved the success that came.
“I sabotaged myself-unsuccessful relationships, a lot of things. I just had a series of bad things, both personally and business-wise, that put me into a really very low point when I met my wife. And things started turning around from there.”
Even when Bacon was a struggling newcomer, fresh from the role as the alcoholic Fenwick in “Diner,” he seemed different from the crop of hotshot young actors. No pretty-boy pretensions, no brat-pack pranks, no moody alienation.
He started on the stage at 17 and moved gracefully into movies, realizing all the while that he didn’t bear the heroic profile or rippling biceps of some of his peers.
“I think ultimately I’m really lucky that still on camera I have something that is not quite classically good-looking,” he says. “There’s still something `off’ about the way I look. It still allows me to play different characters and to not look all the time like a movie star. And that’s hard to do for some actors.”
Today, at 35, Bacon has finally grown into his portrayals. “In a strange kind of way, I spent a lot of years in this weird transitional thing from being a boy to being thought of as a man. It’s really only the last few things I’ve done where I look like a grownup.”
Bacon is a hard-nosed grownup in “The Air Up There,” in which he plays an assistant basketball coach who goes to Africa in search of the perfect slam-dunker.
He was in Kenya and South Africa for 3 1/2 months while making the film, the longest he has ever been separated from his family. The father of a boy and a girl, Bacon is married to actress Kyra Sedgwick. “Life gets more complicated the more dependents you have,” he says, smiling.
“But being away from the family that long was a nightmare. We won’t do it again. She was doing `Heart and Souls’ and working every single day, and we tried to meet in London or something but just couldn’t do it. My daughter learned to walk and talk while I was away. . . . But we learned a lesson. I’m not going to be the daddy who goes away for three months. Now when we go, everybody goes.”
Bacon and his brood live on a farm in Connecticut. After more than half his life in show business, he has managed some wisdom about what he does.
“The best thing about it is, it can, at its best, make people feel something. At its worst, it’s fleeting and often cruel and it’s cold-blooded. There are times when-it’s a cliche-people up at the top are prime and ready for the downslide, and everyone around them is sitting and waiting for that.”