Kevin Bacon can’t recall a time when he didn’t want people to look at him when he walked into a room. “Actors want to be seen, to make our presence known — and if they tell you they don’t, they’re full of it,” says Bacon, known for playing provocative characters, including a few possessed by dead folks or the devil, plus a psychotic killer, a gay hustler and a mentally challenged man.
In his newest movie, the star does indeed make his presence known, and in a most bizarre way: by becoming invisible. As the arrogant, power-mad scientist of “Hollow Man,” he develops a serum that induces invisibility — and simply can’t resist trying it on himself. Now invisible, he’s seduced by this phenomenal, newfound power, and turns into a maniacal monster.
The $100 million science fiction-thriller-horror film, co-starring Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, was helmed by Paul Verhoeven, director of such controversial works as “Basic Instinct,” “Total Recall” and “Showgirls.”
Bacon, who broke through in 1984 with his dancing-rebel role in “Footloose,” has forged a career often punctuated by parts requiring weird makeup jobs or arduous filming conditions: for “Murder in the First,” his hair was showered with crickets to simulate lice infestation. For “Apollo 13,” he worked at sickening zero gravity. But the special-effects-laden “Hollow Man” was physically his toughest part to date.
For starters, to delete him on-screen, Bacon wore a skin-tight leotard and was painted green, blue or black, with matching wig or hood, teeth coverings and half-dollar-size contact lenses. He also wore a glued-on latex mask: “They took this liquid and poured it over my head and stuck a tube in my mouth so I could breathe. Then they let the stuff harden, and 10 minutes later, when they peeled it off, it formed the shape of my face. Wild! For someone with claustrophobia, this would have been the worst,” says Bacon, whose invisible character is in fact seen moving through water, steam and smoky fire.
Right now, the actor, 42, is relaxing at his country house in Connecticut. He is friendly, open and just back from an Italian holiday with his actress wife, Kyra Sedgwick, and their two children, ages 10 and 7. Once a summer storm passes, they’ll grill fish out back. “My private life is intensely dull, and therefore has been blessedly spared too much public scrutiny,” he says. “Nobody is interested in a successful marriage and two kids.”
Bacon went through a hellish seven months — including one production shutdown — of filming “Hollow Man.” And the painstaking makeup sessions put him on the brink. A few times he even lost it. “I just split. Once, only a half-hour before Paul threw a big lunch on the set thanking me for my patience, I, ironically, kicked the door off the makeup trailer,” he says with a laugh.
Yet the most grueling part proved to be the social aspect. Covered in paint and wearing the rubber mask, Bacon says, “You look like a freak, and you feel like a freak. So you end up drawing inside, and people on the set draw away from you a little. It was difficult for them to relate to me as me. And it was hard for me too. That tended to put me in a strange mood.”
But, hey, he’s not complaining. “I’m just a sucker for this kind of job. I mean, God, this is a great gig,” says Bacon, whose favorite toy growing up, youngest of six, in Philadelphia, was a costume box his mom bought him. “I would play fantasy dress-up and just live in my own head, being different characters.” At 13 he took his first drama class.
A career in acting was never a whim for Bacon, a driven guy even in childhood. “It wasn’t something I was going to stop or just try for a while,” he says. “I vowed to keep doing it until I died, whether I made it or not.”
At age 17, he left his native Philly to study acting in New York. Three years later he made his film debut in “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Then came “Diner” in 1982, followed by his star-making turn in the rock-musical movie “Footloose.”
But after that smash hit, everything he filmed over the next seven years bombed. “At one of the lowest points, I was standing on the corner of 86th and Broadway [in Manhattan] and crumbled to the ground,” he says. “I wailed to my wife: `I’m doing a movie about underground worms!’ [1989’s `Tremors’]. It was really a disastrous time for me.”
But, then, appearing as a gay hustler in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” two years later, Bacon’s turnaround kicked in. The character role got him parts in “A Few Good Men” and “The River Wild.” His portrayal of a psycho in the latter snagged him a Golden Globe nod. Next came critically praised roles in “Murder in the First” and “Apollo 13.”
His thirst for acting often has led him to accept small parts or those in low-budget films. For instance, in the $4 million “My Dog Skip,” he played a supporting role as a distant, overprotective father. “A lot of small parts are the ones that have juice, something to offer in terms of what you want to do as an actor,” he says. “I want to act. I want to play. I don’t want to be the same guy” all the time.
“The hard thing is that the amount of time I get to act is minuscule. I’m either in the pursuit of work or doing press. There’s very little time saying lines and hitting [placement] marks. I wish there were more,” he says. “The acting is a blast.”
Bacon, however, manages to find time for another love: playing folk-rock-soul-country music with brother Michael as half of the Bacon Brothers band. Live performance, he says, “gives me something films don’t: I like to get in front of an audience and have that connection, which I control. I say my own lines, sing the words to my own songs.”
“Even before my character becomes invisible, this guy is interesting: He’s a megalomaniac, brilliant, has a tremendous amount of power and a twisted, voyeuristic sexuality. At the same time, he’s childlike. Then he goes through this tremendous transformation and has the ability to get away with” stuff.
Off-screen, Bacon seems to have found bliss with Sedgwick and the kids living in New York City. But a two-actor marriage can spell trouble, yes? No, he insists. “We don’t compete for the same roles, and we don’t perceive one person’s success as our own failure. We’re very tied in to each other — sometimes almost too tied in. Kyra would be ecstatic if `Hollow Man’ is successful — and not for a second would she be thinking, Oh poor me!
“Conversely,” says Bacon, who was “devastated” when Sedgwick’s TV sitcom, “Talk to Me,” was axed no sooner than it debuted this past season, “I was very upset when the show didn’t go. She put her heart and soul into it. But she picked up the pieces and did a picture right afterward, and now she’s looking for the next thing.”
A few years ago, Bacon’s celebrity shot up with a game some college kids hatched, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Spoofing the “Six Degrees of Separation” play and film, it put Bacon squarely in the center of the acting world. Today, there are tons of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Internet sites.
“It didn’t help my career, but I’m flattered. And hearing about it every day,” he says, “I guess I’m glad it’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, not Six Degrees of Nicolas Cage.”
