Kevin Bacon has admitted that he didn’t know Footloose was a “dance movie” when he auditioned for the role.

During an appearance on the latest instalment of Pen Badgley’s podcast, Podcrushed, Kevin revealed that he “didn’t understand” that Footloose was a “dance movie”.

“When I did the dance movie, I was not a dancer. I wasn’t trained as a dancer,” the 65-year-old told the host. “If I’m being honest, I didn’t even really understand that it was a dance movie. I thought it was just a movie, and then, where they would indicate that there was dancing, I would just get up.”

Kevin continued, “They said something about a choreographer and I said, ‘You don’t really need a choreographer. I’ll just get up and dance. It’s not a big deal. Just play the record for me and I’ll jump around.’ So I was definitely not trained by any stretch of the imagination.”

The iconic 1984 dance film, which shot Kevin into the limelight, saw the actor play Chicago teenager Ren McCormack who fights for his right to dance in a small town where dancing is illegal.

Elsewhere in the episode, the Golden Globe winner stated that he had wanted to play more serious roles at the time.

“When I became a pop star, the last thing I wanted to be was a pop star,” Kevin confessed. “I had already moved into, ‘I want to be Dustin Hoffman or Meryl or John Cazale or De Niro. I want to work with Scorsese. I want to do Chekhov.’ You know what I mean?”

He added, “I 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. So I rejected it, full on. I tried to self-sabotage that piece of myself and my popularity.”

The award-winning actor has since starred in films including 1998’s Wild Things and 2020’s You Should Have Left.

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