Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and COVID-19 Relief

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And I just wonder if you could explain, because I know a lot of people know, but that may not be — there may be some who don’t know the six degree kind of — kind of joke that has ballooned over the years.

KEVIN BACON, ACTOR: Quite a few years ago, a couple of guys in — college students kind of came up with this idea that you could play a game where you try to connect me to any other actor in the acting universe in six degrees or less. And I kind of thought it was a joke at my expense. My first reaction was, oh, they’re just talking about, how can this loser be connected to Laurence Olivier, like one of the greats?

(LAUGHTER)

BACON: But it just kind of hung in there for so many years. And I couldn’t — I couldn’t dodge it. It just had this kind of hang time. And now I have sort of embraced it, because it just doesn’t seem to go away.

AMANPOUR: And not only that. I mean, you made the charity in that name, and you’re using it at a time when everybody is yearning for connection, needs to be connected, even if it’s not physically, and needs to feel that kind of help. So — so, I mean, you must have felt kind of good about your charity,, the name, and what you’re able to do.

BACON: Well, I, from the very beginning, have thought to myself, the game has never really been about me. It’s really about the fact, as you point out, that people have a lot of — we do have connections to each other. You need to take me out of the game. The virus is a sort of tragic example of how those connections work, right? We — you go into a crowd, and it comes all over the world, and we’re all very, very aware right now that we are in a global kind of situation. On the flip side, on the positive side, as you see, everyone is trying to connect. We’re connecting with our families. We’re connecting with our friends, with — I think that this kind of isolation has made us realize how important human connection is. And the truth is, is that I was feeling as though people were just kind of escaping in our society into our computers and into our phones and not really — there’s a lot — a lot was written about how we were kind of losing this desire to actually engage with each other. But I think this has really shown us that that is — still burns pretty hot for human beings.