(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 31 January 2026 13:30, UK
Actors turn down roles all the time, but very rarely do they turn down roles that have been written specifically for them to play. Kevin Bacon did, though, and he doesn’t regret it in the slightest.
It sounds like a complete waste of everyone’s time, to be honest; the screenwriters have gone to the effort of scripting a scene that lives or dies by the involvement of a single actor, and when they get a chance to read the pages for themselves, they hate it and refuse to get involved.
To be fair, it sounds like a fairly thankless bit-part, and it wouldn’t have done a single thing for Bacon’s career. The entire point of its existence was to jangle nostalgic keys in front of an audience, and since the writing wasn’t up to scratch, the star ripped the rose-tinted glasses right off the production’s face.
It took him years to make his peace with it, but eventually, the prolific character actor and occasional leading man began to appreciate Footloose. At the time, he was indignant at having headlined a star-making box office smash that seeped into popular culture, because he was thinking long-term.
The picture threatened to pigeonhole him as a boyish leading man and aspiring sex symbol, which was the last thing he wanted. Instead, Bacon shied away from the mainstream to such an extent that, within a few years of the musical drama’s release, his prospects of Hollywood longevity were on life support.
Bacon will slip the DJ a bribe every time he attends a wedding, party, or function to ensure they won’t play Kenny Loggins’ title track when he’s in attendance, but he wasn’t too proud to contemplate making a cameo appearance in Craig Brewer’s 2011 remake as the father of Kenny Wormald’s Ren McCormack.
As meta as it would have been for the original Footloose lead to play the father of the character he’d previously played in the remake, the script simply wasn’t up to snuff. “It was a lousy part,” Bacon explained. “It was McCormack’s father, which I don’t mind, but he was just a miserable prick.”
“I honestly think it would have done a disservice to the film,” he added. “There was no point to me being in the movie.” Since the first and only option to inhabit the role had effectively given Footloose V2.0 the middle finger, the character was completely excised from the project, and the whole idea was mothballed.
“They built a scene that was really only there for me to be in the movie,” Bacon acknowledged. “And once I said no, they took the scene out.” That was the closest he came to embracing his Footloose fame on the big screen, but as a man of principle, if he didn’t think it was worth doing, he wasn’t going to do it for the sake of wink-wink guest spot.
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