Kevin Bacon Talks About His Sobering Role In HBO’s “Taking Chance”

People take risks in life, and what life hands back often is a matter of chance. Kevin Bacon took a gamble on an acting career when he was 18 or so, moving to New York City and trying his best to make a name for himself. More than 30 years and 60-plus films later, he’s a survivor in a tricky and fickle industry and one of the most respected acting talents of his generation. A few years ago, Chance Phelps took a risk of his own, enlisting in the Marines and putting himself in harm’s way as part of the U.S. effort in Iraq. Less than two months after his deployment, Phelps was dead.

No one will ever be able to truly understand why life’s advantages and misfortunes can seem so unfairly distributed, but there is at least a reverent sense of justice in Bacon’s decision to honor Phelps — and by extension, all fallen U.S. soldiers in the Iraq war, and in all previous wars — in the new HBO original film Taking Chance (premiering Feb. 21). Bacon plays Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, a Marine Corps officer who takes the unusual step of volunteering to accompany the remains of the fallen private first class on their journey back home. Taking Chance is a sweeping gesture of a film cowritten by the actual Strobl, who made the trip and accurately documented the incredibly involved process in the script. The film is a sobering look at the painstaking detail and dignity of the process. “There’s nothing that we kind of ‘created’ for dramatic effect,” Bacon insists. “That’s the way it’s done.”

The film presents an indelible image that puts the cost of the current war in its most human terms. “It’s gut-wrenching,” Bacon says. “All the things you read in the paper and the news stories, and images — what few images we have actually seen from Iraq, and the politics of it and the talk shows, the pundits and all of that. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got a body in a box. … When it becomes so focused and in a way, smaller, it gets much bigger. It gets much bigger and more profound. Because I think that we have become numb to war. And that’s, in some ways, the greatest tragedy.”

And What About Six Degrees?

What Could Have Been A Nuisance, Bacon Has Turned Into A Blessing.

Over the years, Kevin Bacon likely has been asked thousands of times about the whole “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” phenomenon, and you might think he’s tired of talking about it. Far from it. In the same way that the game playfully hijacked his career for a parlor game, he has borrowed the brand for his own charity purposes. “About two years ago, I was thinking about the idea of trying to find some way to do something of a charitable nature outside of just my various donations and showing up at events,” he recalls. “I was looking at Paul Newman, just thinking about Paul and all the work that he did with the [Newman’s Own] salad dressing — it was hundreds of millions of dollars. It was just an incredible accomplishment. So I started thinking about what I was branded with, and Six Degrees kept coming up. … So we came up with sixdegrees.org, which is a charitable website that we launched two years ago at Sundance, and it sort of is a way to connect yourself to any kind of charities or volunteer situations that you can possibly imagine.”

But raising money is only part of the game — a major aspect of sixdegrees.org, for Bacon, is connectivity and the spreading of goodwill. “While I completely admire the Bill and Melinda Gateses, and the Warren Buffetts of the world who can give billions to charity, what I’m really interested in is a million people with $10. Because that’s the notion of Six Degrees, to me — that you can spread good work and good feelings, and compassion exponentially, in the same way that everything else is spread exponentially … disease and all the other negative things of the world.”

Feeling For Others, One Role At A Time

Acting is a form of empathy, and for Bacon, that’s a large part of the appeal of his work. “Just to walk in those shoes,” he says, reflectively. “That’s what is so amazing about being an actor … you get these opportunities to walk in all kinds of shoes,” whether they be those of a Marine escorting the fallen or those of an adviser to Richard Nixon, as he does in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon.

“I’m always looking for something new,” he continues. “The idea of getting into a pattern and saying, ‘I’m the guy with the gun who saves the day,’ or ‘I’m the guy who will always brighten up the romantic comedy’ or ‘I’m the funny buffoon who will always be able to laugh at himself’ — to me, I never thought of that as even an option as being an actor. It was always about trying to do as many different kinds of things as possible. And that’s something that’s really hard.”

It’s also something that’s more than likely kept Bacon out of the awards spotlight throughout his decades-long career. Many honors have come his way, but — incredibly — in all of his years in film, never once has he been so much as nominated for an Academy Award. It’s obviously something he has plenty of experience talking about. “On one hand, you know, you don’t want it to seem like false humility. On the other hand, you don’t want to come off as a bitter old @#$%,” he laughs. “Let me say this: There are a lot of things that have become milestones in one’s career, and many of them I have accomplished. And there are still many that would be fantastic to get, and that would be one of them. Especially to the extent that it really affords a lot of opportunities, you know. The parts just get better. … But I didn’t get into this for statues. And if somebody stops me on the street and says to me, ‘This really affected me. This film really meant something to me. Thank you for that.’ If I could put that on my mantelpiece, I would.”

Looking Forward, Not Back

It probably helps Bacon to keep his bitterness at bay that he doesn’t often go back and revisit his past. Once he’s finished with a film, that’s that — usually. He does admit that recent tributes have more or less forced him to do a bit of taking stock that might not otherwise have occurred. “I did one for a benefit recently, up at Dartmouth,” he recalls. “They cut together clip reels and scenes from films. I look at them, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I completely forgot about that!’ because I don’t go back and look at the films.”

For Bacon, seeing himself in older films brings a different kind of reminiscence than we might expect — for the simple reason that his memories and associations differ from his audience’s. “If I look at Tremors, right — silly film, underground worms — what I think about is, Kyra [Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife of more than 20 years] was pregnant with our son, our first baby. I was terrified of the reality of bringing another person into this world, and also thrilled about the prospect of this new chapter of our lives beginning. So that’s what I see when I see Tremors.”

One of the biggest landmark films of Bacon’s past, Footloose, is set for a remake to begin filming this year, starring High School Musical‘s Zac Efron. When we spoke with Efron last year, he expressed his eagerness to meet with Bacon. Since then, the Footloose summit has taken place. “I met him when I was, as I say, carrying my wife’s train — which I seem to do a lot of, these days — at an awards show,” he says. “[Kyra] was off doing interviews, and we chatted a little bit. Seems like a very nice kid — and of course I wish him the best for that movie.”

Giving Thanks

When we spoke near the end of 2008, last Thanksgiving was still a relatively current memory, and Bacon was in a thoughtful mood about the year, his family and the changes their lives have undergone recently. “There are a lot of landmarks this year,” he says. “I’m 50; Kyra and I are 20; 25 years since Footloose; 30 years since Animal House. People keep dropping these big numbers in my lap!”

But the biggest blessing in their lives — and Bacon’s biggest thrill, personally — has been his wife’s ongoing recognition for her work on TNT’s The Closer. At first, he says, his wife wasn’t even sure she wanted to bother to make the trip to shoot the pilot. “When she first was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go out to L.A., I can’t leave the kids,’ and all this, I’m like, ‘First of all, don’t worry about going to L.A. for a few months. I’m going to hang here [in New York] this spring. Go out, shoot the pilot, do the first few episodes and trust me, it’s a cutthroat business — chances are, they’ll never pick it up,'” he laughs, self-deprecatingly.

Since the show’s success, Bacon says he couldn’t be more proud. “Everything that happens for her, to me, is just so thrilling,” he says, almost gushing, “because … for her, there’s been a lot of sacrifice — and a lot of times when she felt like, ‘Well, I guess it’s over. I had my moment to be the “It” girl, and now I’m past that. Maybe I’ll do something else.’ These are all conversations that we had. And the fact that she hung in there and found this great thing just fills me … I’m just so happy for her.”

“You know what’s really amazing about her?” he continues, virtually unstoppable in his praise. “I can honestly say that she just never gave me a vibe — ever — that she was somehow jealous of what I had, or the way that people would react to me, my fame, or any of that. … It’s always astounded me, for years and years, that it never came up.” And Bacon admits to being thankful that his own success has been enduring enough that he’s not threatened by his wife’s sudden star power. “Honestly, if the tables were turned, and she was a way bigger star than me, and I had to live with that for 15 years of marriage, of her being the one that got all the attention, I don’t know if I could handle it. I don’t know if my male ego could survive that. … When we walk down the street, and when I see somebody come up to her instead of coming up to me, it’s just so great. I love it. I just feel so happy for her, because she just really @#$%in’ deserves it. That’s the bottom line. She just really deserves it.”

Going into the new year, Bacon was as busy as you would expect the “Six Degrees” star to be. In addition to his roles in Taking Chance and Frost/Nixon, he recently finished work on another film that, true to form, took him in a completely different direction. (“I played a philandering husband who was a bandleader in the South,” he says of his forthcoming role in My One and Only. “Just goofy, kind of loudmouth characters. Nothing like [Strobl] in Taking Chance.”) His musical efforts with The Bacon Brothers continue as well, with a new album that just debuted in November.

It’s been a wildly storied life for Bacon, who has managed to build his successes into one of the most interesting and varied movie careers today. But as he consistently shows, from his zeal for his wife’s glory to his profound reverence in honoring America’s slain, he never forgets the role that chance has played in allowing his life to unfold so bountifully.