CraveOnline: You say you don’t have much dialogue. From where did you extract your physicality? Was he based on people you knew?
Kevin Bacon: Well, I mean, he’s based not on any one specific person but there’s a lot of stuff that goes into figuring out who he’s going to be. He’s a guy that has a romantic ideal about how the west was won. He’s a guy that’s read a lot of books about Wyatt Earp, Jesse James. He’s a guy that listens to everything from George Strait to Waylon [Jennings], Willie [Nelson] and Kid Rock and Ted Nugent…
Is that part of the process for you, usually? Finding out what of music the character listens to?
Yeah, I do playlists.
Do you keep the playlists of other characters you’ve done? Do you have a lot of mix tapes you could put out there? “Here’s the Murder in the First tape…?”
[Laughs.] Yeah, right. Murder in the First. Hilarious…
I love that movie.
Thank you. Thank you. I don’t really keep them, no. I guess I really don’t keep them. You know, I started this back when it was a question of transferring things to a cassette, but I don’t really have them anymore. Part of that is because, when I’m done with the guy, I tend to want to say goodbye until I get another character. I don’t like to hold onto them.
Are there any that you couldn’t help but hold onto, that just got under your skin?
Well, they do get under your skin while you’re shooting them. They always get under your skin while you’re shooting them. My theory is that you use yourself and then you lose yourself. I use whatever I can, whatever piece of me that I can relate to this character. Of course I’m going to try to use it. But when the camera turns on, I don’t want to feel like me. I want to be lost in whoever that guy is. You know, like Murder in the First.Â
I can’t imagine walking around with your character from Sleepers.
Yeah, well, I’ve played some dark guys, you know? I’m not afraid of it. But to say that it doesn’t affect you while you’re doing it? I don’t stay in character all the time. I don’t have people calling me by my character’s name. That thing is just not part of my process, but it does certainly affect you. On “The Following,” for instance, I’m dealing with blood and guts and murder for six months of the year, fourteen hours a day. Come the weekend, you feel a little weird. It gets into your dreams and stuff.
And then you’ve got to keep coming back to that character over and over again. How does that affect you? You say you don’t like to keep them with you that long…
You know, one of the reasons that I avoided television for so long is that the idea of playing the same guy for, in success, a number of years was… I just didn’t like it. I just didn’t like the idea of just being that person, because to me a lot of what being an actor is about is about walking in other people’s shoes. I do him, and then I do somebody else, and then I can go from an astronaut to a prisoner to a prison guard, you know what I mean? That’s what I dig. So the notion of staying in this thing for years was a little frightening to me, and then I started thinking about the fact that you’re going to have a lot of time to peel the layers back on who this man is, and to show more and more about who he is, and to have him confront new things. That started to get really interesting to me.Â
So it’s like, my character in Cop Car, maybe I’m on screen… I don’t know, maybe a total of a half an hour, forty minutes, because really it’s about the kids… You never see me in a romantic situation. You never see me in a situation where someone in my life has died. There’s a lot of things that you don’t see that you go through. So television is sort of interesting in that way, in that you’re going to get a chance to do a lot of different stuff.
