Kevin Bacon’s experiment as a ‘regular person’ backfires: ‘This sucks’

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After trying out life as a “regular” person, Kevin Bacon is sure of one thing: he likes being famous.

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In a new interview with Vanity Fair, the 66-year-old actor, who has been in the public eye for more than 40 years after breaking out in 1984’s Footloose, said he was curious to see how he’d be treated by people if they didn’t recognize him.

“I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable,” Bacon said. “Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent.”

Bacon hired a team to disguise his identity for his experiment. “I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations, and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise,” he said.

He was outfitted with fake teeth and a different nose, but his test backfired when he realized how poorly he was treated when he visited The Grove in Los Angeles and “nobody recognized me.” 

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“People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” he recalled. “Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f—ing coffee or whatever.”

The encounters weren’t ones he will be eager to have again anytime soon.

“I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous,’” he said.

Even though he started acting in the late ’70s, Bacon blew up in the summer of 1984 when he played the role of Ren McCormack in Footloose. Working steadily ever since, the Golden Globe winner inspired the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon challenge, a game in which players have to try and trace any showbiz personality back to Bacon in six names or fewer.

Last year, Bacon said he was proud to have inspired the contest. “I’ve said this before, and I really truly believe this: The thing about ‘Six Degrees’ is you got to take me out of it. If you take me out of it, the concept is actually beautiful, because it shows that we are all connected – and not only are we connected, but we hunger for connections,” he told PEOPLE.

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“I think we would be better to each other and feel less of a sense of division if we just remembered that we all climbed out of the same swamp, essentially. So in that way, I think ‘Six Degrees’ is actually a really positive thing. We just have to make it about people, and not just about Kevin Bacon.”

In a separate interview with the Podcrushed podcast last year, Bacon said he wasn’t prepared for the level of fame that was thrust upon him when the film became a breakout hit.

“When I did the dance movie, I was not a dancer. I wasn’t trained as a dancer,” Bacon said. “If I’m being honest, I didn’t even really understand that it was a dance movie. I thought it was just a movie, and then, where they would indicate that there was dancing, I would just get up.”

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The last thing he wanted was to become a “pop star,” Bacon continued. “I had already moved into, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl (Streep) or John Cazale or (Robert) De Niro. I want to work with (Martin) Scorsese. I want to do Chekhov.’ You know what I mean? I was so into what my idea of a serious actor was, and all of a sudden I was given this thing that was completely not a serious actor. So I rejected it, full on. I tried to self-sabotage that piece of myself and my popularity.”

Elsewhere in his conversation with Vanity Fair, Bacon, who stars this month in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and MaXXXine, reflected on his 40-plus year career telling the publication that he feels “very grateful for where I happen to be.”

“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,” he said.

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