Kevin Bacon Confirms He Posed as Transfer Student to Prepare for Footloose

Almost 40 years ago, Kevin Bacon played a great hero who squared off against a small town full of people with sticks up their asses. Part of the Footloose mythology in the years since centered on the idea that he actually posed as a transfer student in order to prepare for the role, in which he plays a Chicago teen, who moves to a small town in the Midwest, where dancing is illegal. The actor has said he was petrified by the experience, in which he had to pose as a transfer student for a day, meeting and interacting with ’80s high school kids and selling them on…well, basically the character he would go on to play in the iconic ’80s movie.

Bacon said that the experience of being a fish-out-of-water still had an impact on him, even though he was older than the kids in the school and working on a big movie. He joked that when the crew showed up at the end of the day, the first thing he wanted to do was to go to the bar.

“This is the world’s dumbest ride-along,” Bacon joked in a new episode of Hot Ones. “I wanted to see what the experience would be of an urban kid moving into a rural environment — very, very different culturally. It was so much like the movie I can’t tell you. Some of the badass kids were like ‘Who are you, punk?’ and fronting with me in the bathroom and stuff. And then there was this big, corn-fed dude who took me under his wing and was like ‘Y’all back off. I got it, he’s okay.’ And the girls, when I walked down the hall, were giggling. I had thought, if the character walked into the school on the first day, he would be like ‘Come on, bring it,’ and it was the complete opposite.”

You can see it below.

During a 2018 conversation with John Lithgow for Variety‘s “Actors on Actors,” Bacon said that he had thought as a 23-year-old, nobody would believe him playing a teenager. The fix? Posing as a teenager to prove that other kids would buy it.

“I went and had that same experience for a day,” he recalled. “The only people that knew that I was an actor was the principal and maybe the guidance counselor. The teachers didn’t know. The students didn’t know.”

“Footloose laws” actually existed in parts of the U.S., with one in Arkansas being taken off the books as late as 2018 (although nobody had actually been arrested or fined for it in at least 20 years at the time). The movie was inspired by a similar in Elmore City, Oklahoma. That particular ordinance ended in March 1980, when the school board allowed students to organize a high school prom. In 2010, residents recreated the prom for its 30th anniversary, and kicked things off with Kenny Loggins’ famous Footloose title track.