Kevin Bacon opened up to Vanity Fair in a profile published Wednesday and said that he recently wore a prosthetic disguise to see what it was like to not be recognized.
“People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” Bacon told Vanity Fair. “Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.’”
The actor enlisted a special effects makeup artist to give him fake teeth, a different nose and glasses. Then he went to The Grove, an outdoor mall in Los Angeles, and said nobody recognized him.
While discussing his role in the slasher “MaXXXine,” which premiered Wednesday, Bacon revealed to the magazine that he likes the horror genre because he’s a consumer of it. He also spoke about being raised by his father, Edmund Bacon, a well-known urban planner in Philadelphia who was also called “The Father of Modern Philadelphia.” Bacon said watching his father get recognized in Philadelphia was a “big driving force” in his life.
“In terms of giving credit to my parents, and course I give all the credit to them, my mother was very much on the artistic side and really encouraged acting. My brother was a musician, but in general, amongst the six of us [children], they both encouraged as much creativity as possible in everything — dance, music, theater, painting, sculpture, whatever.”
He continued: “My father was famous in Philadelphia, which in some ways is a small pond, but for me it was a big pond. I saw him get recognized by people when he would walk down the street, and seeing that was definitely a big driving force in my life. Frankly, I wanted to be more famous than him. And you can lay me down on the shrink’s couch. We could talk about that for a while. But it was definitely a motivator.”
