Steadily flows his career

In “Mystic River,” Clint Eastwood’s heralded thriller, Kevin Bacon has the least showy role of the three main protagonists, sandwiched between Sean Penn as a grief-deranged father and Tim Robbins as a wounded, lost soul. And frankly, he’s a bit nervous about it.

“You kind of think, ‘I didn’t get my big scene,’ ” says Bacon, who plays an emotionally detached Boston homicide detective in the drama. “I hope [my performance] is going to read. I hope the character’s backstory is going to read. It takes a lot of confidence, at least for me, because I have always been someone who really wanted in my work to put it out there and add a little bit of pizazz. I want the big characters, and to play this guy who is scaling it back and holding it in is something a little more frightening. It’s really a good exercise for me.”

Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, “Mystic River” is about three boyhood friends from a working-class Boston neighborhood whose lives were forever changed after one of them (Robbins) was molested as a child. The three are reunited as adults after the mercurial Jimmy’s (Penn) daughter is murdered.

It’s Penn’s heart-wrenching vengeful father and Robbins’ damaged victim who have the “big” moments in “Mystic River.” But Bacon’s steady, strong presence proves to be the film’s anchor. He’s been singled out for his work in the Warner Bros. movie that opened Wednesday to some of the best reviews for a studio movie in years. The Times’ Kenneth Turan stated that “Bacon does an expert job getting us involved in the critical choices and decisions of, in Lehane’s words, ‘a guy the world has always worked for.’ ” And the Washington Post’s Deeson Howe says Bacon and his two co-stars all take “their roles to just the right places.”

Penn, who first worked with Bacon 20 years ago in the play “Slab Boys,” says Bacon’s personal integrity and professionalism came through in his performance. “We are the same generation of actors,” Penn says. “We all had the same experiences.... You trust each other because you have been banging around the same hallway for so long.”

Bacon, Penn says, is a true artist. “He goes out there and finds parts of himself and things and makes it happen.”

Bacon’s friend Jay Russell, who directed him in the 1988 indie “End of the Line” as well as the 2000 family film “My Dog Skip,” says Bacon makes courageous choices.

“He’s not afraid to take even what you would consider a tiny supporting part as well as a leading role,” Russell says. “What that means is that he can go from part to part and literally become a new person. That’s why I think he’s had this long and varied career that he has had.”

Bacon points out he plays a role in the coming Meg Ryan erotic thriller, “In the Cut,” that couldn’t be further from the one in “Mystic River.” “He’s a nut,” Bacon explains. “He’s a soap opera actor who played a doctor on a soap opera so long, he decides to go to medical school and he’s having a nervous breakdown. He is more out there.”

Working with Eastwood on “Mystic River” was something of a revelation for Bacon, who says he pursued the project for several years because he wanted to work with the veteran director-actor. “A ‘Mystic River’ doesn’t come around that often,” the low-keyed actor says over breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel.

Eastwood is known to run a tight ship on the set, and Bacon found that his directing method “makes you realize how much nonsense there is on every other set, how much wasted time, how many games are being played, how many things are not conducive as an actor doing your best work. I felt like it was the most conducive situation for doing your best work.”

Eastwood, he says, didn’t rehearse the actors. “He says very, very little. He casts and then he lets you do your thing. I do a lot of my own homework and when I finish that work, I am ready to play. So we didn’t spend a lot of time sitting around talking about motivation. He doesn’t say, ‘Action.’ He says, ‘OK, go ahead.’

“After you finish a scene, there will be this moment and he’ll think about it and say, ‘Yes, I think we got it,’ and you move on. I don’t know how a diva or a ‘divo’ would work in this kind of a situation. No one screams. No one raises their voice. He knows that if he’s got [the take], he’s got it. I wish he’d get me to work with him over and over again.”

Bacon the game

Bacon has been one of Hollywood’s most dependable actors for the past 25 years, during which he’s made 52 movies; not for nothing has he had a popular parlor game named for him -- Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon -- based on his ties to seemingly every working actor in Hollywood.

Dressed in blue jeans and a blue knit sweater, the lean, wiry actor looks at least 10 years younger than his 45 years. Though he’s scheduled to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in less than two hours, Bacon seems pleased but not overly excited about the impending ceremony. And despite his hectic schedule, the actor -- who lives in New York with his wife of 15 years, actress Kyra Sedgwick, and their 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter -- says he’s able to have a pretty normal family life.

“We always spend weekends together,” he says. “I wake up in the morning and take them to school, though my son likes to come home by himself. We have dinner together probably at least three or four nights a week, but when I get busy, I get very, very, very busy.”

Bacon began his film career as Chip Diller, one of the odious members of Delta house’s rival fraternity in 1978’s “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

Bring up his 25th anniversary in films and Bacon seems a bit nonplused. “I am not someone who looks back all that much,” he explains. “I have too many balls I am trying to juggle right now to actually stop and say, ‘Gee.’ ”

John Landis, who directed “Animal House,” says Bacon was so young when he did the movie that he still had his baby fat. “He was a wonderful actor even then,” he says. “He came in and read and he had a really good smirk and if you look at him, there are a couple of moments in ‘Animal House’ that he takes as an actor and runs with it. The scene I always remember is when Stephen Furst as Flounder bumps into him at the rush party and Kevin, with such disdain and contempt, shakes his hand says, ‘How are you?’ Kevin just emanates distaste.”

Bacon sort of treaded water for a while after “Animal House,” even appearing in the original 1980 “Friday the 13th” before being cast as the brilliant but lazy Fenwick in Barry Levinson’s 1982 classic, “Diner.” But it was his performance as the rebellious teenager in the 1984 musical “Footloose” that put him on the map and threatened to turn him into the latest member of the Brat Pack, which included Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore and Ally Sheedy.

“By the time ‘Footloose’ kind of exploded, it put me into a category I really had decided, for whatever reason, I didn’t want, which was a pop star,” says Bacon, who with older brother Michael has a sideline singing career as part of the Bacon Brothers.

“What I wanted to be was a serious actor. I wanted to be deep, a heavyweight. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pop star. I didn’t go the movies that much, but I listened to rock ‘n’ roll like the Monkees. That was my image of a pop star. But by the time I moved to New York, my whole thing turned around because I went to acting school. Everyone’s heroes weren’t pop stars. It was Al, Bobby, Meryl. So by the time I became a pop star, I thought, ‘This is horrible, they are putting me on the cover of Seventeen magazine.’ ”

Now, he says, he wishes he had embraced that pop stardom like Tom Cruise did after “Risky Business” hit for him in 1983. “I would have used it,” Bacon says. “What happens time and time again to pop stars, because there is money associated with that, the roles get better and the directors get better. If you are good like Tom Cruise, you can parlay that into a really, really solid career. But I don’t have any regrets, my career is unique.”

One of Bacon’s first decidedly un-”Footloose” roles was in 1988’s “Criminal Law,” in which he played a charming murderer. “The one thing I remember about him,” says “Law” director Martin Campbell (“Beyond Borders”), “is that he was absolutely zero maintenance as an actor. When you work with actors and actresses, so often there is always a bit of baggage that goes with them. Kevin had his character down right from the word ‘go.’ ”

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, though, Bacon felt his career had stagnated. “I was floundering around trying to do leads in mid-range movies,” he says. “And I was doing these labor-of-love kind of movies. I think I needed to embrace a real character actor kind of thing, which is something I had done for a long time on a stage. There are seminal points in your career or your life, but I don’t think there are that many of them, and one of them was ‘JFK.’ It was a turning point.”

Though Tommy Lee Jones ended up getting an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 1991 Oliver Stone film as Clay Shaw, Bacon received strong notices for his role -- an amalgam of three real people -- as a gay associate of Shaw who implicates him in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

“It was a chance to play a really strong character in a very, very high-profile movie,” he says. “When the movie came out, I could feel things taking a turn.”

Bacon has expanded his career into producing and directing. “I felt like that at a certain age it’s kind of good to start generating your own material,” he says. “Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring is a young man’s game. I was OK doing that in my 20s, being a hired gun.”

He directed Sedgwick in the well-received 1996 Showtime movie “Losing Chase,” and he’s about to direct her again in the low-budget indie “Lover Boy,” a project the couple found.

Bacon hopes to take what he’s learned from Eastwood and apply it to “Lover Boy.”

“I was inspired in terms of one of the best ways to approach actors is to cast them right and then give them encouragement,” he says. “It’s more about telling them about what they are doing right instead of telling them what they are doing wrong.”