John Hughes Remembered: Kevin Bacon (Jake from 'She's Having a Baby')

KEVIN BACON:

Leave it to me to be in the one John Hughes film that doesn’t explode at the box office. I was extremely proud of the movie. It’s without a doubt his most serious film. That some people had a difficult time with it critically was a very hard thing for him, because it was extremely personal. Whether it’s clear or not from the movie, it’s the closest that John ever came to putting himself in a film.

We spent a lot of time together. Not only were we working all day, every day, but then we spent time together every weekend. I kind of started to feel like I was him, or at least some version of him. We would always go for really long and really fun dinners with his family. He loved to just talk, sit and talk, laugh, joke, tell stories.

[The child birth sequence with the Kate Bush song, “This Woman’s Work”] was so intense. He’d picked that song already, so I listened to it again and again and again—he’d play it live on the set. I didn’t have kids then, so I was basically projecting and trying to figure out what that kind of pressure and fear could be. When my son was born, we had a really similar situation, where the cord was around his neck, and they moved [Bacon’s wife] Kyra [Sedgwick] from one room to another. I mean, it was, like, literally straight out of She’s Having A Baby. And the crazy thing was, my reaction was so similar. It’s such a lame thing to say, but it was almost as though I’d practiced for this moment by making this film. I was there going, “Holy s—, John Hughes already took me through this.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)