The most challenging work and the best work I've ever done was in a thing I did for PBS called 'Lemon Sky', a play by Lanford Wilson. I think it's the rawest, most complex work that I've had to do, and the thing I'm most proud of.
— Kevin Bacon
I don't have any plans of slowing down. I love being an actor.
Certainly, network television in general relies a little bit too much on keeping people focused and emotional and scared and pushing the envelope by building wall-to-wall music.
Somebody with a billion followers can tweet, 'See my movie,' and it can still tank. Followers don't always translate into success because I think people are too savvy. When something takes off, it's because people are connecting to it - not because someone with a lot of followers says to care about it.
Do you want to be the guy with a game named after you or be the one with 18 Oscar nominations?
From an acting standpoint, when I was a kid, I thought I knew everything there was to know. As the years go by, this craft becomes more intensive as I get older. You realize how much more there is to know and to learn, and how much better you can get, if you really work at it.
For years and years, people would say, 'The business is changing.' And I would say, 'The business is not changing. It's exactly the same as it was in the '70s, the '80s and the '90s.' But all of a sudden, the business changed, and it really did change.
In my movie work, if I do one guy, the next guy I do, I want to do something kind of different. Even in terms of genre - it's really great to mix it up a little.
People work so hard, and I want to keep that energy up, and you can spread that if you're the actor. But I'm also not able to turn it on and off like a faucet. A lot of what I'm called upon to play is violent or angry. When I'm messing around with the crew and making jokes, I remember, 'Oh, this is the guy I normally am.'
I started making movies in 1977, and I didn't even think about the idea that I would ever be on a television show. Once I finished the 'Guiding Light,' I was like, 'I'm done with television!'
Fame is something that is tough when it comes. It's a weird thing to take on in real life. I was a little bit afraid and, as a result, kind of turned my back on it. You should embrace it because it's going to be a part of who you are, and it's going to be a part of what this business is about.
We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.
'The River Wild' was great, with Meryl Streep. That guy was really a bad dude who was ultimately sort of fundamentally impotent in a weird way. That was kind of interesting.
'Gogglebox' is a show where you watch people watch television.
I was in the first 'Friday The 13th,' and that was a microbudget horror film.
I'm not someone who comes onstage and says, 'I'm rewriting this now.' I don't think it's fair to the writers or the director, or the other actors.
Great writing makes great television.
You can sit around and complain that Hollywood doesn't make any good movies. But you can generate your own material. So I read books. I come up with ideas. I was the producer on 'The Woodsman' to help get that off the ground. Sometimes that extends itself to directing.
To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.
You have to have something in your life that's more important than the work. People don't really like to admit that. They say, 'Oh, my work is my most important thing.'
There is this idea that your social media platform is the secret to success, but no one has quite proven that to be true, if you ask me.
Being with Kyra is so natural for me; it's the easiest aspect of my life. I know that I don't need a beach or room service to be happy.
The way I analyze a script, I don't look at how many days I have off. I see how far they're going to push me. That's just the way I am.
I did a year of 'Guiding Light', and I was going to be a movie actor or a stage actor, but not a TV actor. That just wasn't going to happen. And obviously, things changed so remarkably.
Whether it's my age or my misspent youth, sometimes I forget whether I've worked with somebody or not.
I wanted to do something heroic if I was going to be on TV. And the first thing that appeals to me once I have decided I don't want to be the bad guy is to find things that are not black and white.
From the time I signed on to 'The Following,' things have already vastly changed in the entertainment world in general. It's an adjustment for me.
Keep doing what you're doing. Don't be afraid of fame.
'X-Men: First Class' was fun.
'Kung Fury!' I mean, Jesus, that thing is amazing.
A moustache is actually the one thing I really can grow. One of the bad parts about my facial hair situation is that I can't grow sideburns. I'm happy to still have my own hair on my head, but I can't grow any sideburns. If you ever see me with sideburns, they're not real.
The greats are 'The Shining', 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Don't Look Now', 'The Exorcist' - those movies were not really slashers: they were about psychological terror and had very deep emotional backdrops. If we do our best, '6 Miranda Drive' can be that kind of a movie.
I always have to make it as clear as I possibly can that fame is 99.9 percent good.
I always have a suitcase ready to go. My wife and I are both very much like this. We're both vagabonds, and we have been since the time we were married.
I like to hike and cook. I enjoy furniture and design - not making it, just looking at it. I'm always kind of trying to spread my interests around and try new things.
I'm an actor. It's what I do. It's what I chose to do with my life when I was a little boy, and that's what Im still doing. I like to work. I came up with a work ethic, and that's just what I do.
The whole industry is changing because so many people watch things on DVR, and they watch things on other platforms, and I think everybody is kind of scratching their heads about how this is going to play out.
If you take me out of it, I find 'six degrees' to be a beautiful concept that we should try to live by. It's about compassion and responsibility for everyone on the planet.
I still want to make Kyra proud of the person I am - father, husband, actor, musician.
Doing funny scary is something that is rarely good and rarely works, and it's also something that's incredibly hard to market.
With 'Transparent'. When Amazon put 'Transparent' up, along with 'Bosch' and a few other things, I watched them, and I thought it was an interesting exercise. I didn't comment on them, but I was like, 'Okay, this is kind of cool.'
I wasn't going off to New York to be more famous than my father, but in retrospect, that certainly was driving me. He was famous in Philadelphia, but it was also really important to him to be famous. And to a certain extent, I got some of that, even though there were parts of it that horrified me.
I'm new to this TV thing, at least as an actor. It's a challenge. The thing I have to adjust to is the changing directors every week. That's new for me. I tend to establish with a director - and then two days later, he's gone.
If you look at my movie career, I do switch it up a lot. I'm always looking for a lot of different parts. It's been a while since I've been in a situation that was romantic.
I have fond memories of Chris Penn, who's sadly not with us. He always made me laugh - it was great to be with him.
I like to play characters, man. I almost don't even think of them as good guys or bad guys. I know that's a hard thing to realize, but I really just think of them as characters.
I used to live on Riverside Park in New York, on the Upper West Side.
I like playing complex, interesting characters. Sometimes I don't think there's much of a strong line between right and wrong for a character. Every character is somewhere on a moral spectrum.
One of the top comments I get from people is, 'Oh my God, you're like a regular person!' That's kind of a bizarre thing to live with. I know a lot of famous people, and their lives may not be regular, but they are regular people.
For my wife and I, for so many years, a lot of our identity was based on being Hollywood haters. We were like, 'We're east-coast. We're New Yorkers. This is just a place that we have to come to, but not by choice.'
