Kevin Bacon “rejected” the fame from his role in ‘Footloose’, the movie that launched his career, saying he feared that 1984 hit could negatively impact his career.
The 65-year-old star rose to prominence after playing the part of Ren McCormack in the 1984 musical drama film but wanted to be known as a “serious actor” instead.
Bacon looked back on the musical drama during a recent episode of Podcrushed, hosted by You star Penn Badgley alongside Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari. He said he didn’t only want to be known for his dancing performance as the protagonist, Ren McCormack, in Footloose.
In an interview with the Podcrushed podcast (via Insider), Bacon confessed that he wasn’t very happy with the kind of popularity that Footloose brought him and what that could that mean for his future back then:
“When I became a pop star, the last thing I wanted to be was a pop star. I had already moved into, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl or John Cazale or De Niro. I want to work with 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,” he said.
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Kevin explained, “I thought that, and this is my own acting insecurity – impostor syndrome – I thought that the joke of it was that the great actors could be connected to a loser actor like me.”
However, the Tremors actor added that he “eventually learned to embrace it, and realised it wasn’t really going away”.
“It’s not a thing; it’s not anything you can hold. … It’s just an idea,” he added.
