Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Mon 3 August 2026 19:15, UK
Hollywood is a place where a single what-if, near-miss, or mishap has the ability to alter the course of multiple careers, if not cinema history itself, and one of them handed Kevin Bacon the sharpest double-edged sword he’s ever encountered.
On one hand, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to him, because it set the stage for the four decades of success, longevity, and recognition that followed in its wake. On the other hand, it was so overwhelming that he almost self-sabotaged his professional life because of it, even if he did recover.
He eventually made his peace with it, apart from when he slips DJs money so they don’t play the title track whenever he’s attending a wedding, but for a long time, Bacon despised Footloose. Most people would be grateful for having one movie that strapped a rocket to their back, but not him.
He’d gotten into the business with dreams of alternating between stage and screen, and his number one goal was to be taken seriously as a performer. After playing the lead in a box office smash hit that made him a household name, the potential heartthrob status was too much to bear, with Bacon going out of his way to avoid anything that would stuff him further into that box.
By the end of the 1980s, he was at risk of becoming a forgotten man, but none of that, including his resurgence the following decade, would have happened had Christopher Atkins not ruined his audition. The actor, who’d recently broken out opposite Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon, claims that the part of Ren McCormack was as good as his, had he not been facing a battle of his own.
“I was a mess back then,” the actor, who struggled with alcoholism before getting sober in the late ’80s, recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t go in right now; I’ve been drinking and carrying on’. And they said, ‘No, they need to see you’. And I went in, and I just blew that audition. I mean, it wasn’t even an audition; I had the part, but I was so messed-up that they said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to pass on this guy.’”
Tom Cruise had been the first choice to lead the Footloose cast, but he was committed to shooting All the Right Moves. Rob Lowe has admitted that he unsuccessfully auditioned three times for the part, but from the way Atkins tells it, the role was as good as his, and all he had to do was perform a screen test to seal the deal.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Unfortunately, his personal issues made that a non-starter, opening the door for Bacon to swoop in and secure the job that sent his star soaring. While Atkins has been working steadily ever since, the only thing he’s made in the last 45 years that gave him anywhere near as much visibility as The Blue Lagoon was a recurring stint on Dallas in the mid-80s, so you can understand why he still rues the day.
Bacon, meanwhile, bounced back from his own self-inflicted slump with Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1991, and ever since then, he’s been a near-ubiquitous presence onscreen, all of which can be traced back to Footloose, where the leading role was someone else’s for the taking.
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