Sum of his parts

A lot of actors say they choose their roles based on their gut or their heart or their need to “stretch creatively.” A lot of actors say they don’t think about the big paycheck or the marketing or the awards (even as their agents kill themselves procuring the big paycheck, the marketing and the awards).

Kevin Bacon is more precise. He says he has taken three things off the list of his requirements for a role: the size of the role, the size of the movie and the size of the salary.

And for better or worse, he’s got the career to prove it -- a checkered filmography that has won Bacon accolades but no awards and leads people to regularly describe the actor with career-chilling terms such as “underappreciated talent,” “always solid” and “an indispensable fixture of American cinema.” A career that has led him, perhaps inevitably, to “The Woodsman,” a film that redefines the term “risky.”

Since the beginning, Bacon’s choices have been consistent only in their unpredictability. None of his Brat Packing peers would have followed a teen-idol smash hit (that would be “Footloose”) with a series of “interesting” roles in “quirky” films that only those still playing the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon might remember. (“Quicksilver” connects him to Lawrence Fishburne, “White Water Summer” to Sean Astin, for what it’s worth.)

Nor would most actors have finished up a macho, sledgehammer-swinging lead role in a chilling psychological thriller (“Stir of Echoes”) only to play the monosyllabic, strictly-for-ambience father in a movie about a dog (“My Dog Skip”).

And none of his contemporaries would have shrugged off the smash-hit afterglow of “Mystic River” -- directed by Clint Eastwood! Script by Brian Helgeland! Cast chock-full of heavy hitters! -- by jumping straight into “The Woodsman,” a first-time feature director’s film adapted from an unknown play about a child molester. From the molester’s point of view.

If “Mystic River,” with its damaged adults and victimized children, is dark, “The Woodsman” dwells in the deep hole dug under dark. Bacon’s Walter is a sullen, only marginally repentant pedophile attempting, after 12 years in prison, to reenter a world that understandably does not want him around. Walter would like to be “normal” mostly because he thinks it would make his life a lot easier; it isn’t until the end of the movie that he gives much thought to what he has done to his victims, any thought to the work he will have to do to achieve something approximating normal.

So not exactly “Finding Neverland.” Or “The Aviator.”

Or “Ray.” Not exactly the kind of film Big Name Actors, even those Still Waiting on Oscar, are hollering for.

“I don’t have a plan,” Bacon says when asked where, exactly, “The Woodsman” fits in his career trajectory. “I’ve never had a plan. And if I’d had a plan, it would not have included ‘The Woodsman.’

“But sometimes,” he adds, “you read a script and you hear the voice in your head. So that’s what happened. I heard Walter’s voice.”

Now, it’s important to remember that, underappreciated or not, Bacon is still a movie star, because this is the sort of thing movie stars say all the time. Especially when sitting, as Bacon is, on the patio of the Chateau Marmont.

Anjelica Huston is at the next table over, Denzel Washington is on his way in; each greets Bacon with the relieved fondness of reunited tribal members. And the reason he chose the Chateau to lunch is classic Hollywood -- this is where he and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, brought their first child “home” after he was born. (Bacon had been out in the desert making “Tremors” during Sedgwick’s last trimester.) At 46, Bacon is looking very Industry, slender and sleek, with sunglasses on even in the shade and something spiky and Japanese anime going on with his hair. First he tells the on-it’s-way-to-becoming-folkloric story of how “The Woodsman” came to him. (Important movies never seem to come out of the normal process of agents sending scripts to studios.) In this case, a real estate developer Bacon occasionally sees on the West Indian island where he and his family regularly vacation (see, movie star) asked him to read the script to see if it was worth an investment. Because it was Christmas, Bacon said OK. Halfway through the read, he says, he “knew I had to play Walter.”

Then he explains that he didn’t really give much thought to how such a role might affect his career or how people might perceive him after he played a character that represents society’s last great Villain. Because all he cared about was making a movie that challenged people, that would make them really think about things.

Which is exactly what a million other actors have said when doing advance publicity for their small, purportedly risky films.

The difference is, Kevin Bacon actually made such a movie.

With Walter, Bacon is playing an unsympathetic lead completely without a net. As in Steven Fechter’s play, the film offers no tidy explanation for Walter’s compulsion -- no flashbacks to childhood abuse, no dysfunctional family or traumatic incident for the audience to hang on to. Compared with “The Woodsman,” films like “Monster” and “Sling Blade,” with their victimized predators and cycle-of-violence morality, are bedtime stories. “I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” Bacon says. “The decision was to not make it cut and dry -- if you say he was a sex offender because he was abused, that lets him off the hook somehow.”

Bacon, Fechter and director Nicole Kassell refuse to let Walter off the hook at all. Instead he dangles there, so close to falling that many people have watched certain scenes with their hands in front of their faces as if it were a horror film. Not that there are any images of molestation; the tension is all psychological. Bacon’s performance is a crutch-free, utterly unsentimental attempt to show that there are no monsters, only people who have done monstrous things. And that it is very difficult, though not impossible, for such people to overcome their pathologies.

“I don’t think he is going to ‘get cured,’ ” Bacon says of his character. “It’s like an addiction, so it’s a question of how he’s going to deal with his addiction. Every day of his life. And he only realizes that toward the end.”

Costars Sedgwick, Benjamin Bratt and Mos Def give the audience some emotional signposts by which to navigate, but the success of “The Woodsman” will depend entirely on audiences’ reaction to Bacon’s performance. Newmarket is going with the “Monster” marketing model -- releasing it in a small number of theaters Christmas Eve, then going wider as, the filmmakers hope, word of mouth builds.

This is very much an awards-season release schedule and Oscar hopes are clearly attached to “The Woodsman.” That a first-time female director could produce such a film is worth a lot of ink. But mostly, the chatter is about Bacon. Many people, including Eastwood, were baffled when Bacon did not get a nomination for “Mystic River,” and “The Woodsman” came out of Sundance with terms such as “performance of a lifetime” draped all over it. “Oh I can’t even think about that,” says Bacon, with a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “I have been down that road so many times and I have never won anything.”

Bacon was indeed left out of this year’s Golden Globe nominations and has never been nominated for an Oscar, which is fairly surprising. Ever since his breakout role in “Diner,” he has been labeled one of the best actors of his generation, and the man has been in an enormous number of movies. Fifty-two, if you include the half-dozen uncredited roles; 55 if you count the three still in production. This is the joke of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the parlor game popular in the ‘90s -- that he is so ubiquitous, any actor, living or dead, is within six degrees of having worked with him.

“I got into acting so I didn’t have to be Kevin,” he says. “The actors I admire are always the most versatile. And if I had a plan, which I don’t, it would be to do something different as often as possible.”

In fact, just after wrapping “The Woodsman,” Bacon took a small role as a fey and ruthless hairstylist guru in “Beauty Shop,” a Queen Latifah vehicle that mirrors the successful “Barbershop” franchise. With his hair bleached and streaked and shoulder-length, Bacon channels Arnold Schwarzenegger by way of “Shampoo.”

“I couldn’t believe when they offered it to me,” Bacon says. “I mean, a hairdresser named Jorge. I was just so touched and honored, of course I said yes. I can’t imagine I was their first choice,” he adds, in case someone’s checking. “But still, it was very fun.”

And such a relief from the fearsome five weeks of shooting “The Woodsman.” When you’re playing a pedophile, there are no good days on the set, no breezy romantic scenes, no goofy ad-libbing. The most difficult thing about inhabiting Walter, Bacon says, was waking up each morning “and knowing I was going to have to be him again.”

After “Mystic River,” the man without a plan actually intended to do something different, something lighter, maybe some big studio picture, certainly get away from the darker roles he has taken in the past few years -- the monomaniacal scientist in “The Hollow Man,” the sadistic guard in “Sleepers.”

“Listen,” he says, “I want to play the hero, kick some ass, kiss the girl. I’d love to do more comedy. Certainly I want to make some real money once in a while. But when I read the heroes, they don’t have the character,” he says. “The bad guys are just much more interesting.”

Although Sedgwick was instantly supportive of his decision to do “The Woodsman” -- she joined the cast long after he had committed -- she has, Bacon says, expressed concern about the tenor of some of her husband’s roles.

“She says, ‘Do you have to always be drawn to the dark stuff?’ And I am. Of course I am,” he says, finally pushing up his sunglasses to reveal a face at once familiar and not; up close, he looks more like a guy, less like a movie star. A guy who looks a lot like Kevin Bacon. “All of us carry around anger and sadness and sexually extreme feelings in our heart that we don’t act on,” he says. “That’s what makes movies meaningful and ultimately therapeutic.”

And the fact that he is not personally a tortured soul makes the roles more enticing. “I don’t have any serious problems in my real life,” he says. “I’m happily married, I have a supportive family, a good job, I can do anything I want to do. So I put on different hats, different skins, to see what that feels like.”

His next film, with Colin Firth, is an erotic thriller called “Where the Truth Lies.” In it he plays half of a musical-comedy team, but he admits a little sheepishly, there’s nothing particularly comedic about it.

“It’s very intense,” he says, smiling reluctantly, “and dark. Though not,” he adds hastily, “as dark as ‘The Woodsman.’ ”

Bacon is a man who smiles sideways and not very often, at least not when he’s talking about “The Woodsman,” partly because it’s not a smiley sort of topic and partly because talking about a movie is his least favorite part of the project.

But he’s talking about this movie a lot because he knows it is a film that needs a lot of “nurturing.” He wants to reassure people that there is nothing graphic in the film and that none of the filmmakers were trying to say that, underneath it all, child molesters are OK guys.

“Statistically, the sexual abuse of children is off the charts in this country. Which means there are abusers all around us.” He gestures unabashedly, and unironically, around the restaurant. “This isn’t a movie about how to fix that. It isn’t a movie about what causes that. I wanted to challenge the idea of demonizing the abusers.”

“I did not set out to make this guy sympathetic,” Bacon says, settling back in his chair, replacing the sunglasses even though the light around him is still dim with shade. “All I wanted was for him to be a human being. Because that is what he is.”

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@ latimes.com.