Kevin Bacon asks wedding DJs not to play ‘Footloose’ so guests don’t ask him to dance

Kevin Bacon is weary. Let him rest!

The Footloose star recently revealed at a SXSW career retrospective that his “worst nightmare is to be at a wedding and the DJ puts on the music” from the 1984 classic, according to Variety.

“They always start out being about the bride, and then there’s alcohol involved,” Bacon said. “And by about 10:30, the song comes on, and suddenly the wedding becomes about me getting out and dancing. People will literally form a circle around me and clap their hands like I’m a trained monkey.”

“It’s not because I don’t love the song; I do love this song. It’s not because I’m not proud of the movie; I’m 100 percent proud of it,” he explained, adding that the enduring popularity of the film is “what I wanted, I have no one to blame but myself. It was definitely my dream to have all those things.”

But it’s hard for people outside a spotlight as bright and glaring as the one on Bacon to “realize there’s something kind of strange about it.” Now, when Bacon goes to weddings, he asks the DJs, “Please don’t play that song.”

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Bacon had already been steadily acting for several years when he landed the lead role of Ren McCormack in Herbert Ross’s parable of a small town rebelling against conservative censure through dance. The film catapulted the Philadelphia native to stardom, leading to acclaimed performances in films like JFK, Apollo 13, and Mystic River.

Though he’s won Golden Globes and SAG Awards for subsequent performances, found success on TV series like City on a Hill and I Love Dick, and now shepherded his daughter with wife Kyra Sedgwick, Sosie Bacon, to her own successful career in horror films like Smile, Bacon is still haunted by the role that first got eyes on him.

Though he’s gladly reprised the role and danced the titular dance over the years, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Bacon has less than wholly positive feelings about Footloose.

In 2023, he revealed that he “rejected” his Footloose fame early on, because he was “so into what my idea of a serious actor was, and all of a sudden I was given this thing that was completely not a serious actor.” When asked last year if he’d be open to a Footloose remake, he diplomatically replied, “Never say never…. I think it would be a disaster.”