By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY
Kevin Bacon famously put on dancing shoes, and he wouldn't be opposed to putting on zombie makeup.
By Murray Close, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Diabolical plans revealed: Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw tells fellow mutant Emma Frost (January Jones) about his plot to launch a nuclear war in X-Men: First Class, out Friday.
By Murray Close, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Diabolical plans revealed: Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw tells fellow mutant Emma Frost (January Jones) about his plot to launch a nuclear war in X-Men: First Class, out Friday.
"I'm obsessed with zombies," the former Footloose star says. "I like watching zombie movies and I read zombie books."
That kind of role may be a bit left of field for fans of Bacon's conventional dramas such as Mystic River, Apollo 13 and The Woodsman, but so might his newest: superpowered villain Sebastian Shaw in the 1960s-set X-Men: First Class, which hits theaters Friday. He's the thorn in the side of fellow mutants Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) and their team of do-gooders, as well as the human world at large.
When you start the Cuban Missile Crisis, that officially makes you one really bad dude.
"Exactly!" Bacon says. "I like him because he's evil, but he's smooth and suave and sort of charming."
In the Marvel comic books as well as the movie, Shaw absorbs energy and can harness it and throw it back at whoever is attacking him. It's a metaphor for the kind of extremely adaptable guy Shaw is, Bacon says. "Whoever he happens to be talking to, he's going to pick up on their energy and use it against them. He's a different guy if he's talking to a Russian general or a little kid or a beautiful woman."
The impressive muttonchops carry over from comic to screen ? "I borrowed them," Bacon says of his stunt sideburns ? but otherwise his take is much different in look from the Shaw who first appeared in X-Men comics in 1980, "which I'm very happy about," Bacon says, laughing. "He kind of looks like Benjamin Franklin on steroids. I'd have to spend a lot of time in the gym. I don't think any amount of time in the gym could get me looking like that guy."
When Bacon was growing up, he was cognizant of X-Men and other comics but was not a fan.
"That's not what I spent my money on as a little kid," Bacon, 52, says. "My father would turn his pants upside down and the change would fall out of his pockets, and when he wasn't looking, you'd run up to his room and grab as much change as you could. I would spend that on records but not on comic books."
Bacon splits time between New York and Los Angeles? with wife, The Closer star Kyra Sedgwick, as well as son Travis, 21, and daughter Sosie, 19. Though his kids don't see his movies with regularity, Bacon says, they might see X-Men: First Class because of its young cast, a new crop of actors and actresses who are now simply one degree of separation from him.
"Certainly with my daughter, that's what she would be drawn to," says Bacon, who shares much of his screen time with January Jones' Emma Frost in the movie. "We're a team for a while ? until I trade her in for another model."
Bacon next appears in Crazy, Stupid, Love (out July 29) in a small role opposite Steve Carell and Julianne Moore. Part of him, though, would kill to play a private detective in a movie.
"There's something that's always been, I don't know, cool and interesting and tempting about that world," he says. "I just recently rented The Long Goodbye with Elliott Gould, and there are super-cool ways to go and they're often fun characters."
He's reminded that those kinds of movies aren't quite as popular now as, say, superhero flicks or ? lucky for him ? a zombie film.
"Yeah, so I should probably pick something I might have a chance of playing," Bacon says, laughing. "What would that be, a vampire?"
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