Kevin Bacon Reflects on His Footloose Role

Years ago, there was a film called Footloose. And in it, a great hero -- named Kevin Bacon -- taught an entire city full of people with
sticks up their butts that dancing is the greatest thing there is. Now, while he promotes his new movie They/Them, Bacon says that he considers it a "great gift" to have been a part of Footloose, which made him a household name in 1984. The actor and musician, who recently revisited the world of Tremors, told Today that he thinks a different kind of return -- a Broadway show -- is at least partially responsible for why Footloose endures.

In Footloose, Bacon plays a Chicago teen who moves to a small town in the Midwest, where dancing is illegal. The actor recently confirmed lore surrounding the movie, that he 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.  

"I love it," Bacon told Today. "I think it's great. It's like all of those things that you think 'Oh, my gosh, is it ever going to go away?' At a certain point, you have to embrace the beast."

"It was a great gift to be part of that movie," he added. "I certainly took it very seriously when I was doing it and I love that people will still come up and say that they just showed it to their kids."

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.