Kevin Bacon is famous.
Decades in Hollywood have made this prolific actor a household name, but he once decided to try a life outside the spotlight. To do so, he used prosthetics and accessories to disguise himself, but didn’t like the results.
“I’m not complaining, but my face is pretty recognizable,” Bacon explained in a new interview with Vanity Fair. “Just wearing a hat and glasses only helps to a certain extent.”
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedwick make rare appearance with their adult children
Kevin Bacon went anonymous in order to experience life as a normal human being. (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images)
To truly avoid recognition, he said, “I went to a special effects makeup artist and asked him to help me create a prosthetic disguise.”
With the help of a makeup artist, he got a new nose and new teeth, and added some accessories before heading out to The Grove, a popular outdoor shopping center in Los Angeles.
“Nobody noticed me,” he recalls. “Everyone just pushed past me, and they weren’t nice to me. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to queue to get a coffee. I was like, ‘This is the worst. I want to be famous again.'”
Kevin Bacon made his film debut in 1978 in Animal House. (Getty Images)
As Bacon explained later in the interview, fame was something he had always wanted, even as a child.
“My father [Edmund Bacon, an urban planner] “He was famous in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is a small pond in some ways, but it was a big pond to me,” he explained, “and seeing him walk down the street and people recognizing him was definitely a big driving force in my life.”
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“To be honest with you, I wanted to be more famous than him. You can put me on a psychiatrist’s couch and I can talk about that for a while, but it was definitely a motivator.”
For Bacon, it’s not just about fame: He told Vanity Fair that he remains committed to the art of acting, nearly 50 years after his feature film debut in 1978’s Animal House.
Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, have both been in the film industry for decades. (Kevin Maz)
“Yes, I’m still hungry and I feel like the best work is ahead of me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a competition. It’s a competition with myself. Maybe I’ve done that in the past, but I don’t look at this actor and think, ‘I wish I could act like him,’ or ‘I wish I could act the same as him.'”
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“I don’t reach out to people because I’m trying to get a job, but because I think it feels good to have someone appreciate what you’re doing as an artist. It feels good when someone you respect comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, I loved that,’ or ‘Nice job,'”
Bacon has been in a band with his brother since the ’90s. (Getty Images)
He also criticized the film industry, saying much of it is “a silly story of a hierarchy” that gives people in the industry “an underlying feeling that they have to compete with each other.”
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“So wherever I can feel like I’m part of a community supporting each other to create something that I think is really important, I want to do that,” Bacon emphasized.
