‘The First Time’ With Kevin Bacon

On the heels of starring in the new horror film You Should Have Left, Kevin Bacon discussed his career and more in the latest installment of Rolling Stone‘s “The First Time.”

Bacon kicked off with the first time he worked with You Should Have Left director David Koepp, known for writing the screenplays to Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and more. The actor starred in the writer-director’s 1999 film Stir of Echoes. “Ever since we made it, I wanted to do something else with him,” he said. “But it took 20 years of, like, begging him and wearing him down to finally get to make You Should Have Left.”

The actor also described his first role on Animal House (“a wild way to kick it off”), a part he got while a student at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City. The casting director called Bacon to tell him he had to fly out to Oregon. “I’d barely been on a plane, honestly,” he said. “I was like, ‘My laundry, I gotta pick up my laundry!’ and he’s like, ‘You don’t understand, either you’re coming or you’re not gonna do this movie.’”

For the iconic 1984 dance film Footloose, Bacon fondly remembered that he claimed he didn’t need a choreographer. “I was like, ‘I don’t need a choreographer,’” he said. “‘Just turn on the music, I’ll dance. I didn’t really understand the extent of what it was going to be. I just didn’t get it. It was a really fast and exhausting and challenging lesson in, ‘Come on, time to go. This is a dance movie.’”

Elsewhere in the video, the actor shared the first song he ever wrote as a child — “All the World Looks Lonely Through Lonely Eyes” — that he hoped Michael Jackson would record. “It wasn’t even for me to sing,” he laughed. “It was for Michael Jackson to sing.”