Kevin Bacon Really Wants to Join This Marvel Studios Franchise

Kevin Bacon’s role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an interesting one. He exists in the world of the movies as Kevin Bacon, movie star and childhood hero to Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord. As an aside, he’s less of a hero to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker. In any case, he would still like to actually appear in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie — and while it might seem like that’s a hard sell given how many time she has been name-dropped in-story, think of it this way: David Hasselhoff was name-dropped, too, and then got to cameo as a suspiciously-similar alien substitute.

Bacon has been asked dozens of times since the first Guardians of the Galaxy whether he would appear in the series, and he has always been a fan of the idea. Could it happen? Well, he isn’t speculating about that — but we certainly are cheerleading for the idea of him popping up in the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

“Listen, I love the idea,” Bacon told Esquire “I would love to be part of that.”

In the movies, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill was abducted by aliens as a kid in the ’80s, and so Footloose was his high water mark for cinema, and Kevin Bacon was a hero. That gag surprised and delighted audiences at the time — none more than Bacon himself.

“When I saw Guardians of the Galaxy, I went to see it having no idea that I was discussed,” Bacon recalled for the magazine. “It was an afternoon in New York, I was on 67th Street and went by myself, as I often do.. I was like, ‘Holy shit. They’re talking about me. Are you guys getting this?’”

While Bacon and Footloose are unassailably cool on their own, it’s less than six degrees of separation before you get to how Bacon might find his way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Bacon appeared in Super, James Gunn’s rowdy, pre-Marvel superhero movie.

“I did a movie with James Gunn. It was a movie that he did before he started that series. It was a tiny, tiny little movie and we were in Shreveport, Louisiana,” Bacon told ComicBook in 2020. “A movie with Rainn Wilson. It was a part that apparently he had originally had Jean-Claude Van Damme. Jean-Claude fell out for some reason. James called me and I had been a fan of this movie Slither than he had made. He said, ‘Hey, you wanna come do this part?’ I said, ‘Take Jean Claude Van Damme’s sloppy seconds? Definitely.’”