If you were thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so great to be a celebrity, first of all, you don’t have a choice, and second, Kevin Bacon is here to to convince you otherwise.
In an interview with The Graham Norton Show on Friday, Bacon explained that being famous is actually extremely satisfying nearly all the time:
“People don’t talk about the fact that being recognizable is 99.9% good, because people are nice to you all day long for absolutely no reason. People stop you in the street and say, ‘Kevin, I love you.’ I mean, who doesn’t want to be loved? Who doesn’t want to have somebody say, ‘I love you’…that’s a great feeling. And you can get out of tickets. And they’ll give you sneakers and shit like that.”
But, as any well-adjusted celebrity knows, life is not just about love. It’s also about dramatically altering one’s appearance with special effects makeup in order to test that love.
“Once in a while you think to yourself, ‘what would it be like to just walk through the world anonymously?’” Bacon mused. So, with the help of professional makeup artists, that’s exactly what he tried to do.
It worked a little too well. Bacon arrived at L.A.’s bustling outdoor shopping complex, The Grove, wearing his disguise, ready to receive free sneakers and hugs, but, because he didn’t look like Kevin Bacon, got nothing.
“Nobody recognized me, and it was awful,” said the actor.
Kevin Bacon, I loved you in Balto.