Kevin Bacon may have taken a paddle to the ass in Animal House and an arrow through the throat in Friday the 13th but he gained his first true fame with 1984’s Footloose. From there, with movies like Flatliners, A Few Good Men and, perhaps most importantly, JFK, it seemed like Kevin Bacon had worked with just about every major name in Hollywood. Thus, the greatest movie challenge of all time was born: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
But, as he explained on a recent episode of Podcrushed (via Entertainment Weekly), Kevin Bacon initially thought the Six Degrees game was making fun of him. “I thought that, and this is my own acting insecurity — impostor syndrome — I thought that the joke of it was that the great actors could be connected to a loser actor like me…They were saying, ‘Look, can you believe he can be connected by Meryl Streep?’ By the way, I think I had already worked with Meryl Streep, so it wasn’t even… It’s just in my own head.” (For what it’s worth, since Bacon and Streep worked together directly on The River Wild, her Bacon number is 1.) Over time, however, Bacon was left with no choice but to go along with the fun. “I eventually learned to embrace it, and I realized it wasn’t really going away…it’s just an idea.” Bacon would embrace the phrase so much that he launched a podcast called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon and a charity called SixDegrees.com, which plays off of the phenomenon that made his namesake game so fun.
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has actually been around for nearly three decades, stemming from an interview Bacon gave in which he said he felt like had worked with everybody in the business or at least somebody who had. According to the website The Oracle of Bacon – a website devoted to the game – the average Bacon number for any given actor is 3.098. Come to think of it, did you know Charles Manson has a Bacon number of 3?
Kevin Bacon can next be seen in The Toxic Avenger, which now drops Peter Dinklage’s Bacon number from 2 to 1.
Where does your favorite actor sit in the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? Let us that magic number below!