Kevin Bacon appears in a pair of films hitting screens this week in MaXXXine and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, but there was once a time when the award-winning actor dreamt of living out of the spotlight — to the point of getting into character as a regular person.
A new profile in Vanity Fair opens with an anecdote about how Bacon once tried "walking through life as a regular, non-famous person" by putting on a disguise.
Of course, it wasn't at a level like you see above, with Bacon telling Vanity Fair, "Putting my hat and glasses on is only going to work to a certain extent." Instead, he continued, "I went to a special effects makeup artist, had consultations, and asked him to make me a prosthetic disguise."
Bacon was fitted with "fake teeth, a slightly different nose, and glasses," and went to try out his new look at an outdoor shopping mall called the Grove, which Vanity Fair characterizes as "one of the most densely populated locations in Los Angeles."
The disguise worked, but after all those years of being recognized in public, Bacon soon found that his newfound invisibility didn't quite suit him.
"People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice," he recalled of his time at the Grove. "Nobody said, 'I love you.' I had to wait in line to, I don't know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, 'This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.'"
Vanity Fair notes how Bacon's disguise made him look much like his character in MaXXXine, a private investigator tasked with tracking down Mia Goth's titular protagonist.
"I honestly feel very grateful for where I happen to be," he told the outlet. "That I can have two totally different movies coming out within a couple of days of each other, and completely different roles. The fact they would both come my way is the thing that I feel the most gratitude for. I've fought really long and hard for it."
Read Exclaim!'s review of MaXXXine, ahead of reading Bacon's complete Vanity Fair interview.