Kevin Bacon is no stranger to fame.
After decades in Hollywood, the prolific actor has become a household name. But he once decided to try life outside the spotlight. To do this, he used prosthetics and accessories to form a disguise, but he didn’t like what happened.
“I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable,” Bacon explained in a new interview with Vanity Fair. “Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent.”
To be able to truly be unrecognizable, he said, “I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise.”
With the makeup artist’s help, he was given a new nose and new teeth. After adding accessories, he ventured out to The Grove, a popular outdoor shopping center in Los Angeles.
“Nobody recognized me,” he recalled. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f—ing coffee or whatever. I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.'”
As Bacon explained later in the interview, fame was always something he wanted, even as a child.
“My father [Edmund Bacon, an urban planner] was famous in Philadelphia, which, in some ways, is a small pond. But, for me, it was a big pond,” he explained. “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.”
For Bacon, it’s not only about fame. He told Vanity Fair nearly 50 years after his feature film debut in 1978’s “Animal House” he’s still invested in the art of acting.
“Yes, I am still hungry, and I still feel like the best work is in front of me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a competition. It’s a competition with myself. I probably did this in the past, but I’m not looking at this actor going, ‘I wish I was him’ or ‘I wish I had what he had.’
“When I reach out to people, it’s not because I’m trying to get a gig. It’s because I feel like being appreciated for what you do as an artist from somebody else is a nice feeling. If there’s somebody that I admire that comes up and says, ‘Hey, I really like that’ or ‘You did a good job,’ it feels good.”
He also criticized the film industry, saying much of it is “hierarchical bulls—” that causes people within the industry to have “this underlying feeling that we need to be competing with each other.”
“So, wherever I can feel like I’m a member of a community that is supporting each other in creating these things that I think are super important, I want to do that,” Bacon emphasized.
