Kevin Bacon’s ‘worst nightmare’ about ‘Footloose’

Kevin Bacon’s “worst nightmare” involves one of his most iconic movie roles.

While reflecting on his career during a panel at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, the 66-year-old actor spoke about “Footloose,” the 1984 film that put him on the map, and how the iconic title song from the musical drama continues to haunt him more than 40 years after its release.

​”My worst nightmare is to be at a wedding and the DJ puts on the music and the song comes on and suddenly the wedding becomes about me, and people form a circle around me and I become a trained monkey,” Bacon explained. “So I’ve gone to the DJs and said, ‘Please don’t play that song.’ It’s not that I don’t like the song.”

The song “Footloose,” co-written and recorded by Kenny Loggins for the film, is played in the final scene of the movie, and went on to receive a best original song nomination at the 1985 Academy Awards.

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The film stars Bacon as Ren McCormack, a teenager who moves from Chicago to a small Midwestern town, where he is shocked to find out that dancing and rock music have been made illegal. Although “Footloose” features many dance scenes, Bacon admits he “was not a trained dancer” going into it.

“Growing up in Philly, I loved dancing. In [New York], I would go to Studio 54 and dance all night all alone — and this was when I was a waiter. I always loved it,” he told the SXSW crowd.

“My worst nightmare is to be at a wedding and the DJ puts on the music and the song comes on and suddenly the wedding becomes about me, and people form a circle around me and I become a trained monkey.”

— Kevin Bacon

Bacon continued: “But when they sent the script to me, I did not know it was a dance movie. They had talked about choreographers [and] I was like, ‘I don’t really need a choreographer. You can just turn the music on, and I can just dance around and have fun with it.’ And they were like, ‘Ah — na na na, you don’t know what you’re getting in to.’”

In April 2024, Bacon returned to the Utah high school where the movie was filmed, following a social media campaign started by the students of Payson High. The campaign included videos of the students re-enacting scenes from the film and posting them online with the hashtag #bacontopayson.

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A video posted by Salt Lake City’s ABC 4 at the time showed the actor joking that “things look a little different around here. I’d say the thing that looks the most different is me.”

“When I first heard about this ‘Bacon to Payson’ thing, I was like ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ But you were all just tireless. Unrelenting… You talked me into it,” he said. “I think it’s great to see that kind of commitment to anything.”

After the success of “Footloose,” Bacon continued starring in successful movies, including “Mystic River,” “Apollo 13,” “A Few Good Men,” “Frost/Nixon” and many others.

During the panel, the veteran actor also explained that “it was my dream to have my name in lights” and to sit with Johnny Carson on his talk show, but when he finally achieved those dreams, he “realize[d] that there is something kind of strange about it.”

“Now I am used to it. I had impostor syndrome and I was resistant of it, and I did not want to do press and be on magazines,” Bacon continued. “I wanted to be a serious actor — I did not want to be a pop star. It was the opposite of how I wanted to view myself.”