"I didn’t even really understand that it was a dance movie"- Kevin Bacon on how Footloose fame put him on the wrong track

Kevin Bacon is one of the most renowned actors in Hollywood right now, but the Footloose star had his fair share of struggles after being branded as a pop actor, a classification he did not really like. Bacon is renowned for a lot of serious work in his later career, including A Few Good Men and Appollo 13, but he was rather typecasted in a particular role after his initial burst of fame.

Kevin Bacon didn't plan on being in a dance movie, without which, his career could have been completely different, and not necessarily in a good way. Yet, he auditioned for Footloose, and after the role made him one of the most popular actors of the time, he resented the image he had built, as revealed by the 65-year-old in a recent appearance on the Podcrushed podcast.

He even revealed that, at the time, he barely had an idea about the kind of movie Footloose was. He said:

"When I did the dance movie, I was not a dancer. I wasn’t trained as a dancer,...If I’m being honest, I didn’t even really understand that it was a dance movie. I thought it was just a movie, and then, where they would indicate that there was dancing, I would just get up."

He added:

"They said something about a choreographer and I said, ‘You don’t really need a choreographer. I’ll just get up and dance. It’s not a big deal. Just play the record for me and I’ll jump around.’ So I was definitely not trained by any stretch of the imagination."

Despite this, Footloose's success set Kevin Bacon on a path where he would be remembered as a Hollywood icon.

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"The last thing I wanted to be was a pop star"- Kevin Bacon on his initial popularity from Footloose

Footloose was enough to turn Kevin Bacon into America's heartthrob, and despite living a dream scenario, Bacon was far from satisfied. In fact, in the podcast, he admitted that he resented all the things, including the glitz and glamor, that he dreamed of as a child.

By the time fame hit Bacon, he was already wanting to do something different with his acting skills i.e. performing serious roles with serious directors. He said on the podcast:

"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 added:

"I was very, very uncomfortable with photo shoots and magazines, and all these things that I dreamed of as a kid....Everything that I had dreamed of gave me a tremendous amount of self-doubt and anxiety."

Of course, though this was not the path he wanted to take, Kevin Bacon eventually reached his destination by the later part of his career. He ended up working with legendary directors like Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone, in the process, cementing his name in Hollyoowd's golden books.