For years, people made a game of the ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ – attempting to connect Hollywood icons to the Footloose actor in just six steps. Well this week, Pilot TV is down to one degree – we sat down with the legendary screen star as he returns in crime drama City On A Hill, back for its third season on Paramount+.
As well as talking the return of his character Jackie Rohr, Bacon touched on courtroom dramas, the Tremors series that never came to be, his upcoming quiz show Lucky 13, and much more. Listen to the full interview on this week’s Pilot TV Podcast – and read the edited highlights below.
PILOT TV: Jackie Rohr started the show as a corrupt cop. At the start of Season 3, he’s no longer a cop, he’s lost all his privileges. How would you describe his state of mind as we begin the season?
Kevin Bacon: Well, you know, there's two points of view. Jackie, really got fired from the FBI – but in his mind, he retired. I think that he's a little bit of a man without a purpose, he's picking up some odd jobs in a bar where we see him with DeCourcey for the first time. And he's doing a lot of sitting on the couch and watching cartoons. His wife, Jenny really wants him to get out of the house. She never really liked him being in the FBI in the first place, but that was better than him sitting around all day not doing anything and not making any money. So he's running out of money, and he doesn't have much of a purpose.
I would not have taken Jackie Rohr for a cartoon guy! Was that in the script, or was that a suggestion from you?
That wasn't a suggestion from me. One of the great things about the writers is that they always find something new and interesting about Jackie. Jackie is a surprising person, even from the first season – his ability to quote pieces of pretty obscure literature and legal things, and all kinds of stuff. Sports, politics – he has one of these minds that is very, very surprising a lot of times.
You’ve described him as ‘a man of the street, but incredibly well-read’. He pulls these quotes out of nowhere – do you have a favourite one, or one that’s surprised you?
There was a scene – and it's on my mind now because of the death of Bill Russell, who was a great basketball legend. Jackie has a whole speech, I think in Season 2, about the story of Bill Russell and the kind of racism that he faced being in the city of Boston. I can't remember what his point was really. [laughs] Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what his actual point is, but it was a story that he related in a lot of detail to DeCourcey, and it just was in my mind because of the passing of Bill.
There's just something inherently dramatic about a courtroom. It's people's life and death situations on the line.
In each season you move from one neighbourhood in Boston to another – much of Season 3 will be taking place in Beacon Hill. How does that inform Jackie’s character and arc this season?
Yeah, well, Jackie has done well at the FBI, but he certainly wasn't raised with any kind of money. And so, to step into this world of extreme wealth – the character, even though he's an ex-FBI agent, his family is a very wealthy family, descended from pilgrims. It's not really a world that Jackie is used to walking in. And so he's a fish out of water this season, you know. I think he looks around that house and sees that kind of wealth – and you know, he even says it at one point later on, 'Sure, I'd like to have this for my wife.' He hands him the keys to a nice BMW and he's kind of like, 'Damn this is pretty cool. I could do with this.' But what that really sets up is a real kind of moral dilemma, once he sees what's going on in that house. Is he going to do the right thing, and call this Sinclair character out on what he's doing to these young women?
You work with Aldis Hodge on this show, and many of the scenes take place in a courtroom. Does shooting those scenes take you back to A Few Good Men? Have you had conversations with Aldis about your work on that film?
Yeah, I took Aldis aside and said, ‘Okay, let me tell you how to act in a courtroom’. [laughs] No, he's fantastic in that courtroom stuff. I mean, he's always great but in the final episode he has a great, great courtroom scene that he just knocks out of the park. Yeah, I do think about A Few Good Men. What's interesting about courtroom is that it's just inherently dramatic. It just works all the time. That's why something like A Few Good Men, or To Kill A Mockingbird, or even Law And Order season after season... there's just something inherently dramatic about what goes on in a courtroom. A lot of times it's people's life and death situations that are on the line. You see the drama unfolding in that moment when the jury reads the verdict.
Is there a character you’ve played on film that you’d love to give the TV treatment to?
I did a movie called Tremors – it was not a hit in the movie theater, but it was a huge hit on video, and spawned a whole bunch of sequels that I wasn’t in. And Blumhouse and I developed a series for it a few years ago, and that to me would have been an interesting series. It didn't get picked up, but I wanted to explore what had happened to that guy in the course of 25 years. Other than that, I don't know that there's characters that- I was talking to somebody the other day about, I did a movie 40 years ago called Diner and someone was saying, "Well, you should revisit that with the guys now", and I don't know... I'm not sure. I mean, never say never. But what's funny now is that I've been around long enough that my movies are being remade – not with me, but that they remade Footloose, they've remade Flatliners, and they're just about to remake The River Wild, which is a movie that I did with Meryl Streep years ago. And that's kind of like, "Oh, wow, has it now become like a period piece?"
One character you might get to play again is X-Men: First Class’s Sebastian Shaw, given the whole multiversal nature of the MCU. You have a great death scenes in that with Magneto – do you have any particular memories of filming that one?
Working with Mike was great, you know, Fassbender – he’s such a good actor. Up until that point, I’d had experience in green-screen, but it hadn’t been my world. And it does have its challenges. We're professional pretenders, so we're always trying to create something that's not there and try to make it real.Michael and I were just kind of surrounded by green all day, sort of doing that face-off scene, and that that definitely, definitely had its challenges.
You’re about to host a new quiz show, Lucky 13. What made you want to sign up for it?
This company had tremendous success in the UK with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire – and it wasn't even something that was necessarily on my radar, but they sent me a number of possibilities of things that they were knocking around in the quiz-slash-reality thing. I read this pitch for Lucky 13, and then we went and played the game actually. It was funny, I happened to be driving and my wife was in the car, so she was listening to me play this game. And it's just a super cool, fun game. It just is exciting, it just works. I thought, at this point in my life there's so many things that I have done, why not try something new and see how it goes? I feel like I've always tried to say, "Well, how about I make my own rules?" I don't follow the rules necessarily, of the rest of the world. I'll make my own rules. So this is one of those moments where I can just try something new.
City On A Hill Season 3 is coming to Paramount+. Listen to new episodes of the Pilot TV Podcast every Monday.