Kevin Bacon has remembered the time a dead body was discovered on the set of 1998’s Wild Things.
The 66-year-old Footloose star appeared in the erotic thriller alongside Denise Richards, Neve Campbell, and Matt Dillon. The movie — about a teen debutante (Richards), who, after failing to attract her guidance counselor (Dillon), accuses him of rape — was primarily filmed in Miami, Florida.
During a recent appearance on Variety’s YouTube series, Know Your Lines, Bacon was asked to identify bits of dialogue from some of his most notable projects, including Wild Things.
Though he was unable to recognize his character, Sgt. Ray Duquette’s quote — “People aren’t always what they appear to be. Don’t forget that” — he did recall the moment a dead body was found floating in the Everglades marsh they were filming in.
“We were out in the swamp one night — a lot of mosquitoes, wow — and we were shooting some scene, I don’t remember what it was, by kind of a river,” Bacon explained. “They had floated a raft out there so that they could put out a light.
“All of a sudden, I hear across the walkie-talkie: ‘Hey, uh, I think I just saw a floater.’ And it was a body that was floating by,” Bacon recounted. “It was kind of indicative of the vibe of the movie.”
The critically derided movie, which has since become a cult classic, was directed by John McNaughton, who told Entertainment Weekly in 2014 that production was briefly halted after the eery discovery.
“We called the police, and they actually grabbed the body and kept it from getting into our shot,” he said.
Bacon currently leads Amazon Prime Video’s new action-horror series, The Bondsman.
The eight-episode limited series, which is out now, follows Hub Halloran (Bacon), a murdered bounty hunter raised from the dead by the Devil with the sole intention of capturing escaped demons and returning them to Hell.
Ahead of the show’s April 3 premiere, Bacon sat down at SXSW film festival for a career retrospective, where he discussed his breakthrough role in 1984’s dance musical Footloose.
Of the fame that his role as Ren, a dance-loving teenager, catapulted him to, Bacon said: “It’s what I wanted; I have no one to blame but myself. It was definitely my dream to have all those things. But until you really have that, you don’t really realize there’s something kind of strange about it.”
