It’s hard to believe that it’s been 40 years since we first heard that gravel voice of Kenny Loggins demanding, “Everybody cut footloose!” It’s a lyric that altered pop culture – and dancefloors around the world – forever.
Oh, and the movie? Well, that caused worldwide bedlam too, and still has its star, Kevin Bacon, shaking in his shoes thinking about it.
“When I became a popstar, the last thing I wanted to be was a popstar,” Kevin, 65, tells the Podcrushed podcast of his overnight fame that came after the film’s release in 1984.
“I had already moved into, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl or De Niro.’ You know what I mean? I was so into what my idea of a serious actor was, and all of a sudden I was given this thing that was completely not a serious actor.”
While Kevin had already appeared in more than 10 films, including National Lampoon’s Animal House and Friday The 13th, the actor’s ambition to be taken seriously saw him, just like his character Ren in the film, revolt against what was being expected of him.
“I rejected it, full on,” he says. “I tried to self-sabotage that piece of myself and my popularity.”
Kevin also adds that he was left “very, very uncomfortable” with the ensuing press attention and photoshoots that came with being a heartthrob, saying that something he had dreamed of before, as a kid, actually “gave me a tremendous amount of self-doubt and anxiety”.
ONE FOOT AHEAD
Despite its grittiness, Footloose, which also stars Lori Singer, John Lithgow and Sarah Jessica Parker, became loved for its dancing sequences, which Kevin admits took him a while to wrap his head around.
“If I’m being honest, I didn’t even really understand that it was a dance movie. I thought it was just a movie, and then, where they would indicate that there was dancing, I would just get up,” he says.
“They said something about a choreographer and I said, ‘You don’t really need a choreographer. I’ll just get up and dance. It’s not a big deal.
Just play the record for me and I’ll jump around.’ So I was definitely not trained by any stretch of the imagination.”
DANCING ONCE AGAIN
Even four decades on, his nonchalance for the film has carried on – he previously admitted to tipping wedding DJs for not playing the famous title song so he didn’t have to dance to it – but he’s since expressed how much the film had changed his life and even slipped back into his dancing shoes to recreate the famous dance scene on TikTok to mark the end of the Hollywood strikes.
Now is it the right time to ask when the sequel is finally coming, Kevin?
We can only dream…
You can stream Footloose on Prime Video and Paramount Plus.
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