Rise to Fame
The shortlist for Ren McCormack included Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe. Bacon got the job anyway, and Footloose went on to gross $80 million on an $8 million budget. He'd already done Friday the 13th and Diner, but Footloose made him a poster on walls. The typecasting followed fast. He's said he felt like he was 'sliding down the Hollywood mountain' after the peak faded, so he answered by playing a gay hustler in JFK and leaning into character work so hard that Hollywood forgot he'd ever been a pin-up.
In the Spotlight
Three Albright College students snowed in with a TV in January 1994 accidentally turned him into a cultural concept: connect any actor to Bacon in six steps. He hated it for years, convinced the joke was at his expense. By 2007, he'd turned the premise into a nonprofit called SixDegrees.org. The Madoff fraud hit harder than the mockery did: he's said he and Kyra Sedgwick had most of their savings in the scheme when it collapsed in 2008. He kept working. Sirens debuted at #1 on Netflix in 2025, which is either a comeback story or proof he never left.
Side Notes
A PBS genealogy show revealed he and Kyra Sedgwick are ninth cousins, which they've taken in stride. His father was Edmund Bacon, the urban planner who reshaped postwar Philadelphia. He grew up in that civic household and then spent four decades acting in New York without ever relocating to Los Angeles. He also fronts a band with his brother, the Bacon Brothers, 12 albums deep, with sets at Carnegie Hall and the Grand Ole Opry. The Friday the 13th death scene still photo remains his most-requested autograph, which he says genuinely bothers him.