Kevin Bacon has often wondered what it would be like to live as an ordinary person, someone who hasn’t been killed onscreen by Meryl Streep, gone to space with Tom Hanks, or faced off against Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in a courtroom. A person so unremarkable that there isn’t a parlor game named after them. Someone who could walk around without being asked for a selfie by a stranger.
Bacon decided to test this fantasy by donning a disguise. “I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable,” Bacon explained in a recent Zoom interview. “Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent.”
To truly blend in, the Golden Globe-winning actor and musician went a step further. “I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations, and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise,” Bacon said. He was outfitted with fake teeth, a slightly different nose, and glasses—a getup that made him look a lot like his character in the new Ti West horror film “MaXXXine,” a sleazy private detective.
Bacon tested his normal-person camouflage at one of the most densely populated locations in Los Angeles: The Grove, an outdoor shopping mall perpetually full of tourists. To his initial delight, the disguise worked. “Nobody recognized me,” he said. But then an unfamiliar sensation washed over him: the feeling of being invisible.
At The Grove, Bacon recalled, “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 coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”
When he’s onscreen, Bacon loves disappearing completely into a character. That much is clear in “MaXXXine,” the third film in West’s horror series. Bacon fully embraces his character’s sleaziness, delivering sinister lines in a full Louisiana accent. The film premiered the same week that Bacon appeared in a movie on the other end of the genre spectrum: the Eddie Murphy action-comedy “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.” Murphy even proclaimed Bacon “the perfect villain” for the franchise.
“I honestly feel very grateful for where I happen to be,” Bacon said in a wide-ranging conversation. “That I can have two totally different movies coming out within a couple of days of each other, and completely different roles. The fact they would both come my way is the thing that I feel the most gratitude for. I’ve fought really long and hard for it.”
Ahead of his double premiere week, Bacon reflected on the time his career literally changed overnight, revealed one of his only regrets, and shared how he tries to combat Hollywood’s “hierarchical bullshit.”
In “MaXXXine,” Bacon plays a detective with a thick New Orleans accent who wears white linen suits and a mustache, and drinks Bloody Marys. “Ti is the type of person and director who is confident enough to be comfortable collaborating, so we started banging around some ideas,” Bacon said. “He wanted me to go as far as possible, and I like taking big swings. 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.”
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.”
“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.”
Bacon, who starred in his wife Kyra Sedgwick’s directorial debut, “Space Oddity,” went back to stardom last week, walking the Red Carpet for the recently-released A24 film “MaXXXine.”
Reflecting on his brief stint as an average person, Bacon’s experience was eye-opening. “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 coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”
Source: Vanity Fair, Salon
