“This is what it’s come to”: the movie Kevin Bacon only made because his “career was in the toilet”
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 5 October 2025 14:45, UK
With almost 50 years of experience under his belt, Kevin Bacon has learned to take the rough with the smooth. That hasn’t always been the case, though, with the actor taking a while before he learned how to make peace with the things that initially bugged the shit out of him.
Take Footloose, for instance. Bacon may have racked up a pair of cult favourites right out of the gate with small roles in Animal House and the original Friday the 13th, but it was the smash hit musical drama that turned him into a star, and it took him a long time before he managed to reconcile with it.
As thrilled as he was to have made a name for himself, he didn’t want to become that kind of actor, so he decided to pivot in a completely different direction. To this day, it’s best not to play Kenny Loggins’ title track when he’s in earshot, but that determination to prove himself almost backfired spectacularly.
To avoid being cast as a teen heartthrob, even though he was pushing 30, Bacon prioritised interesting scripts. An admirable attempt at reinvention, but one that didn’t go to plan when he ended the 1980s with a whimper. He made eight films after Footloose, six of them bombed at the box office, and he’s barely in one of the two that didn’t, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
It wasn’t how he saw things going, and when it came time to sign on for his first picture of the 1990s, he was out of options. “To be brutally honest, I was running out of money, and I was at a real kind of low point, career-wise,” he reflected. “I had a series of leading roles that just all bombed, and I felt that my career was close to ending.”
When his post-Footloose momentum was at its apex, he never would have dreamed of starring in a low-budget creature feature like Tremors, but alternatives were nonexistent: “When my agent called me up and said, ‘There’s this movie, I don’t know if you’re gonna like it, it’s kind of a horror movie, but it’s also sort of funny, and it’s about giant worms underground’, I was like, ‘Oh my god, my career is in the toilet.’”
His options were limited, which left him on the precipice of an existential breakdown. “If this is what it’s come to, this is like the bottom of the barrel,” Bacon reflected, but money was tight, and he needed a job, so he reluctantly agreed to do it. Gritting his teeth and bearing it, he made Tremors, only to discover that it became a word-of-mouth sensation on home video among B-movie aficionados.
These days, Bacon looks back fondly at the experience, and he’s even shown an interest in reprising the role of Val McKee for the first time since the original. Technically, he did that already in the pilot for a 2018 TV series, but the franchise was so niche that not a single network was interested in picking it up, despite the presence of an established star.
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